


it happens quietly

by 8sword



Category: Captain America (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Crossover Pairings, Domestic, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Team Free Dorito
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 00:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2793011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We're at the gas station. Can you come get us?"</p><p>Panic thunders through him. He presses the gas pedal all the way to the floor. "Who's we, Emma?"</p><p>"Me," she says, "and Uncle Bucky."</p>
            </blockquote>





	it happens quietly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orange_8_hands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_8_hands/gifts).



> for orange. Please forgive the angst and length and woeful lack of sex. 
> 
> Liberties taken with continuity and Latin and Russian and also English. This takes place in a sort of S8 AU. Unbeta'd. Title from Bradley Caleb Kane's "Once."

 

 

_Do not feel sad. It is all right. Many things cannot fly._

\-- The Land Before Time

 

 

The first time Steve and Emma meet, they just sort of stare at each other: Emma shyly and Steve furtively. They keep looking at each other for the whole time Dean's talking to Steve, like the other one doesn't notice, and finally Dean just says, "You wanna hold her?"

Steve pulls back like a scandalized grandmother, and Emma freezes up in Dean's hold, giving him this stricken, betrayed look. But then Steve says, "Only if you want to--I mean--I don't want to do anything you don't want to do, Emma."

His eyes are all big and earnest, and he's crouching down so as to be her size, and Emma looks back at Dean, her eyes all guarded the way she's learned to be, with him, and then she tips backward to be let out of his hold. She still hides behind his leg for a second, studying Steve, and then she suffers herself to be picked up.

Steve looks at her. She looks at him. They are both going nearly cross-eyed, their noses nearly touching.

Then Emma sneezes.

Dean's pretty sure that's the moment Cap falls in love with her.

 

\- -

 

The sound of his bike motoring down their street and pulling into their driveway becomes a familiar sound, one that summons Emma from even her favorite cartoons or her sulkiest pouts, sending her zooming out the front door and straight into the long legs coming up their front steps. Steve always wears gloves when he rides, leather fingerless ones that turn Dean on more than they should, and when he crouches down in front of Emma on the porch, he lets her pull them off his hands one finger at a time. He encourages her as she counts them out aloud, her forehead scrunched in five-year-old concentration: "One, two, three, four, five…ummmm…" ("Ssss…" Steve prompts, looking very solemn with his big blue eyes.) " _Six_! Six seven eight nine ten!”

And Steve, he acts like it's the most amazing thing in the world, knowing how to count to ten. "Wow!" he exclaims, still at Emma's level on the ground. "You're so good at that! I think you should become the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury."

Then of course Emma wants to know what the U.S. Treasury is, and what the Secretary for it does, and they come inside and settle in on the couch, and Steve explains money and budgets and governments and why it's important for the government to take care of money carefully and know how to keep good count. And Emma gazes wide-eyed up at him like she's listening to God himself, and Dean skulks in the kitchen doorway listening and pretending not to until Steve says, "Your dad's really good at taking care of money, he's like the treasurer of your house. Aren't you, Dean?"

Dean looks up from the stack of recipes he's been pretending to look through. "What? Oh, yeah. I guess so."

"He's modest," Steve confides to Emma with a conspiratorial _you and me know the truth_ wink, which delights Emma to no end, and she looks over at Dean with a new light in her eyes, a new appreciation, and a flush of gratefulness goes through Dean so strong that it feels like something shameful, so big and so overwhelming. He feels like he might explode sometimes, looking at Cap in his high-waisted pants and tucked-in plaid and slicked-back hair. He's nothing Dean would have ever wanted and everything he does and he knows he'll never be able to keep him.

 

That night Cap stays for dinner, joking and grinning at their little round kitchen table, and when Emma goes to bed, she demands a bedtime story of what Cap was doing today that he still smells like guns and smoke.

Steve doesn't like the idea of exposing kids to the sort of violence he deals with one missions, and Dean knows that, it's one of the (many) things that make him feel unworthy, because he's never quite been able, or tried as hard, to shield Emma from the violence of his own life; so he clears his throat and he says, "Hey, Emster, how 'bout you tell Cap a story?"

Emma likes this idea. She happily spins a tale about a stuffed teddy bear that magically gets turned big and decides to start fighting aliens and wendigos, and her story ends with Teddy figuring out how to turn his best friend Cera the Triceratops big, too, and they steal a Chevy Impala to drive to New York and join the Avengers, The End.

"Oh," Steve says in disappointment. He's stretched out on his side on top of Emma's covers with his head propped on his hand. "Not _To Be Continued_?"

This response delights Emma all over again, of course. She dives under her covers to hide her elation, and Steve chuckles, pats her shoulders through the blankets and stands up, turning off her lamp. The multi-colored glow from her Captain America shield-shaped nightlight follows him out of her room as he draws it nearly shut behind him, and Dean pushes away from the hallway wall against which he's been leaning to listen.

Steve looks at him with a smile from beneath his hair, the shy tilt he does with his head where he looks out from under his eyelashes. "Think you've got a Frank Baum on your hands."

"Something like that," Dean says. "You staying?"

Steve studies him a minute. "Do you want me to?"

Instead of answering with words, Dean draws him down the hall into his bedroom, where the bed has a dark plain bedspread and an even darker headboard. He sits down on the mattress and watches Steve get undressed, first his belt and then his tucked-in shirt and the undershirt beneath it, and the neatly pressed slacks, setting them down carefully on the bureau next to Dean's picture of his mom, until he's just in his white boxer briefs. He looks less naked than he is, with healing cuts still scattered across his arms and back and chest from whatever shrapnel he encountered wherever he was today before he came to them, Dean traces the sites with his eyes, the lines of muscle and collarbones and the tendons in Steve's neck, up to his face, and his blue eyes steady on Dean.

Dean just stares back for a long moment. Then he lifts his arms and pulls his shirt over his head.

Steve steps closer and takes it from him. He sets it gently down on the bureau next to his own things. Then he falls fluidly into a crouch and unfastens Dean's jeans, pulling them gently down his legs as Dean lifts his hips to let him. These, too, he places carefully on the bureau, and then he rises, just as fluidly as he sank, and falls upon Dean slow, like a wave curling over him, carrying him backward into the mattress as he hovers above him, blue eyes and warm skin.

Dean lifts his hands and runs them up Steve's sides, callused palms and fingers against the thin hairs that stand up along Steve's skin, the muscles that shift beneath it. Steve rolls his shoulders, luxuriating in the feeling like a big cat, his eyes never leaving Dean's. They only fall shut as he lowers his head for a kiss, and Dean slides his hands from his sides around to his back, knees coming up to embrace Steve's hips. They breathe and sigh and rock slowly together as the old house creaks to sleep around them, the mattress and sheets shifting beneath the minute movements of their hips.

 

When Steve gets back from a mission in the Baltic two months later, there's an e-mail on his personal cellular phone that has been forwarded from his e-mail account by JARVIS. It's a form letter, that starts with "Dear Parents/Guardians" from a MS. AMANDA HOLTZ, amanda.holtz@lincoln-sd.edu.

Steve calls Dean's phone. It goes straight to voicemail, so he calls another number, which is picked up with a "This is Mills."

"Sheriff?" Steve says.

"That's me," she says. "You callin' for Emma, Cap?"

"Yes," he says. "Please."

"Course," Sheriff Mills says, and he hears her getting to her feet. "She's upstairs with Alex, just gimme two minutes. I suppose you're gonna ask if I know where Dean is?"

"I wouldn't mind knowing," Steve says dryly, and she laughs.

"Well, I'd tell you if I knew," she says. "He dropped her off two days ago, said he had something to do but didn't say what. Still waiting to hear from him myself."

Her tone is light, but there's worry in her words. Steve says nothing, brow creased, and Mills sighs, hands him off to Emma. "Here she is, Steve."

Emma comes onto the phone like a hurricane. "Uncle Steve! Did you get my e-mail!"

"Say hello first, doofus," he hears Alex say in the background, and Emma says, "Hi, Uncle Steve," then repeats eagerly, "Did you get my email?"

"I did," he says. "What does it mean? You want me to come to your class?"

"Yes!" she says. "For Career Day. Everybody's bringing someone to show what their moms and dads do, and I told Ms. Holtz I wanted you to come. We didn't have your email, but she helped me find it on the computer! Did you know there's whole websites with pictures of you?"

"I…I did know that," Steve says, slightly at a loss.

"Will you come?" Emma says. "I know you're really busy, only it's just nobody believed me when I said you were my uncle and they were laughing and I--" Her voice cracks, "I don't know where Daddy is, Uncle Steve."

Steve's heart breaks down the middle.

"Of course I'll come," he says quietly. "Sweetheart. Of course I'll come."

 

He shows up at Emma's elementary school at promptly eight-fifty a.m. Thursday morning, in a blue button-down and khakis. He gets a visitor's sticker in the office and follows two women in business suits and heels down the corridor, pretending not to notice the glances they shoot at each other and over their shoulder back at him.

In the classroom, the kids are all seated neatly in their rows of desks, several parents seated in the child-sized chairs at the back of the room already, and they all fall silent when Steve slides as surreptitiously as he can into the room.

Except Emma, who jumps to her feet and runs to him.

She buries her face in his leg. Her face is very hot, her hands tightly gripping the fabric of his slacks. He picks her up, holding her tightly, and she turns to hide her face in his neck.

The teacher, who wears a nametag that says MS. HOLTZ, comes over. "Thank you for coming," she says. She looks a little pale, staring up at him she can't believe what she's seeing.

"It's my privilege," Steve says. "Could we--?" He nods down at Emma as well as he can with her head under his chin.

"Yes," she says. "Yes, of course, please--" and steps out of his way for them to step back into the hallway.

But Emma shakes her head against his neck, and pushes until he puts her back down again. She swipes her fist across her eyes and sniffs once and then straightens up determinedly.

"You sit back there," she informs him, pointing at where the other adults are, and then she runs back to her desk.

The kids all converge on her, their eyes on Steve but their mouths moving, and Emma straightens even further in her chair, like a little queen, or even Peggy, and Steve almost has to hide a smile behind his fist as he slips to the back of the room.

They're about two parents into the presentations when Dean rushes through the classroom door in one of his snazzy blue suit jackets, flushed and panting like he rushed to get there. He stops short when he sees Steve at the back of the room.

Steve gives a little wave. Something in his chest has eased immeasurably at the sight of Dean's face, haggard but uninjured, and something has gone so tight that it throbs in his fists.

Dean sits down in the only chair left, one a few feet away from Steve. The parent goes on, wrapping up, and ten minutes later it's Emma's parent's turn to go, and Steve looks at Dean. Dean doesn't meet his eyes, though, just shakes his head, and Steve compresses his lips and heads to the front of the room, where the board is white and not covered in chalk.

Perhaps the kids and parents and Mrs. Holtz expected him to talk about Avenging, or even the War, but he talks instead about the jobs he had before the serum, about delivering papers and drawing grocery ads and fetching water back and forth at a laundry and how no matter how hard any job was it was always harder not to have one, and not have food at night or heat in the winter. There's looks of furrowed-brow confusion among the children, and pity and unease among the parents, but it's Dean's expression that gives Steve pause, Dean who is looking at him from across the room with his brows knit and lip drawn beneath his teeth, staring at Steve like he's seeing him for the first time.

 

Afterward. The kids all run to give their parents hugs before they leave, and Emma stays at her desk and doesn't move, and Steve goes to it and gives Dean a look that says he had better come, too. Dean inches closer, looking haggard and old once more, the astonishment from before faded from his face, and Emma's eyes flick to him once before returning to the card on her desk, the one they're each supposed to make to thank their family members for coming.

"Emma," Steve says, and Dean sucks in a breath like he's going to say something, too. But he doesn't, and Steve crouches. "Thank you for inviting me."

"Thank you for coming," she mumbles, to her crayon, and doesn't look at him. She leans into his hand, though, when he pets her hair, once.

He leaves the room. Dean follows on his heels, brogues clicking on the linoleum floor and then the concrete sidewalk.

Steve slides his hands into his pockets. "So."

"So," Dean echoes. He drags a hand down his face. This close, Steve can smell the sweat on him, the underlying scent of dust, dirt, something like the old farms they used to bunk in on the front, old hay in older stalls left empty by evacuation and the war. The smell of it makes the righteousness drain out of Steve, tired, and he looks at Dean with more concern than indignation, now, taking in the small cuts on his knuckles, the larger one suggested by the bulge of bandage beneath the forearm of his suit sleeve.

"Sorry," Steve says. "If I'd known you would be here in time--"

Dean waves off the apology. "No," he says. "I'd rather--I'm glad she didn't not have anyone there at all."

Something about the way his lip twists when he says it makes Steve think maybe Dean has been in the position of not having anyone there at all. He bumps his shoulder with his own as they walk. "You have any plans for the rest of the day?"

Dean lets out a breath. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "No offense, Cap, but I don't think I'm gonna be real good company today."

"Why's that?"

Dean looks at him. It's times like this Steve feels how much older Dean is than him, the years he spent in fire that Steve spent in ice. There are lines at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth and beneath the stubble on his face.

"You don't wanna know," Dean says.

"You don't wanna tell me," Steve counters. It's an old argument, between them.

"Nope," Dean says, popping the _p_ , and sounds tired enough that Steve juts out his jaw, forehead creasing. He looks away, out onto the highway just past the fence, and then looks back at him.

"At least let me take you to lunch."

Dean chews on his cheek for a minute, squinting out at the highway, too. Then he draws in a breath, and it's like watching a parachute open up, the way he inhales a smirk into his mouth, a glint into his eye. He looks over at Steve. "You askin' me on a date, Cap?"

Steve wants to tell Dean to drop the song and dance. That he prefers the truthful version of Dean, even if it is tired and slack like rubber that’s aged and cracked. But it's not his choice to make, and so he says honestly, "If you want it to be."

"'Course I do," Dean says, and Steve gets onto his bike. Dean climbs onto it behind him, hitching up the hems of his patterned trousers, curling his hands around Steve's belt. Steve glances back at him, eyebrows raised meaningfully, and Dean makes a face and lets go of him just long enough to pull the helmet out of the top box.

"Grandpa," he mutters, and Steve pinches his thigh where it's crammed up against his own.

 

He knows he compromises when it comes to Dean. He lets go unasked questions that should have been answered, and he will think of it later, when he's talking to Fury in a launch bay bigger than anything he could ever have imagined. There are stipulations he should have made, with Dean. Things he should have demanded, or at least demanded to know. For Emma, for himself. But he was so alone, and so scared of Dean running away. And--

_Yeah, we compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well._

 

They make an incongruous pair in the diner booth, Dean in his suit and Steve in his casual button-up. The wait staff here are used to them by now, though; Steve has dropped into town enough times between Avenger responsibilities to become a face at which they smile welcomingly instead of gape. They order coffees to start, and Dean loosens his tie as he skims a glance across the menu he already knows by heart. Steve watches him, stirring sugar into his black coffee.

"Was all that true?" Dean says finally. He closes the menu, leans back in the booth, arm coming up to drape over the back, the nonchalance of the motion belied by the bouncing of his knee. "About--not being able to work and not having food."

"Would I lie to a class of five-year-olds?"

Dean breathes out a huff of a laugh, lifting his coffee to his lips. "True," he says into the mug.

"Me'n Bucky lived by the skin of our knuckles, sometimes." Steve presses his palms against the ceramic of his own mug, remembering winters without heat, winters that were blurs of illness broken only by Bucky coaxing warm liquids and bitter medications into his mouth; the humiliated guilt that Bucky had to buy medicine for him again, instead of a coat or shoes or a proper date with one of his girls. "He went too often without, for me."

Dean's quiet for a minute, staring down at his coffee. "I'd like to have met him. Barnes, I mean."

"You two woulda got along famously." Steve thumbs the rim of his mug slowly. "You smile like him, sometimes."

Dean smiles into his coffee, above his loosened tie. Cuts his eyes to Cap, the glint back in them. "That why you're messin' around with an asshole like me?"

Steve puts his hand on top of Dean's silverware. "Your charm is entirely your own."

Dean hooks a smirk. "The charm I haven't got, you mean."

"Exactly," Steve agrees solemnly, and Dean steals his coffee in retaliation.

 

\- - -

 

The helicarriers go down in D.C., and Dean goes quiet and wary, gets a little TV to go in the kitchen so they can have the news on all the time while he makes dinner and helps Emma with homework. His phones stay silent, all his phones stay silent, and when there are texts or calls, they're from Amelia, or Jody,  or other people who aren't Steve.

There are stories asking _Where Is Captain America?_ and _What Is the Government Hiding_ and _Cap On Ice--Maybe America Didn't Escape the Potomac_. Emma comes home quiet and wide-eyed; she comes home gripping Dean's hand like he'll disappear if she lets go of him. She says, "Marie says her mom thinks he's dead" and "Mason's dad said they should give up looking" and "Is he dead? Is he _dead_ , Daddy?"

Dean murmurs lies. Dean holds her on his hip and makes her help him cook dinner and takes her to the park and checks out extra dinosaur books from the library to read, and keeps them both busy, busy, busy.

One night he's braiding her freshly washed hair into a plait at bedtime, glancing every few seconds down at the hairstyle book lying open on the kitchen table. He's just looping the hair tie around the end when a knock comes on the door.

He gets up, glancing at Emma. She darts obediently into the little cubbyhole under the stairs, crouching down with her knees at her chest.

He puts his hand to the front table in the hall where a Taurus is locked as he leans in to look through the peephole. And freezes.

He opens the door. Steve looks at him, blue eyes clear and sheepish and tired.

Dean doesn't say anything. He also doesn't move, for a second, except for the violent, aborted movement of his hand. Then he shifts one step to the side, making room for Steve to come in, and Steve does. Dean closes the door.

Emma crawls out from her hiding place. "Uncle Steve!"

She flings herself at him. Dean gives her a minute to hug his legs, then he says, "All right, Emma. Time for you to go upstairs."

Emma twists to look at him with wide eyes. "But--"

"Upstairs," he says firmly. "Dad needs to talk to Uncle Steve about big people stuff."

She pulls away from Steve, looking back and forth between them like she can sense the tension in the air. The back of her nightgown is damp from her wet braid. "But…"

"It's all right," Steve says soothingly. She looks at him, and his blue eyes, though tired and faded above the unfamiliar beard on his face, are reassuring. "Your dad and I'll be fine, Emma."

Dean's hand twitches again. He digs it into the denim of his jeans, clenching his jaw, and watches Emma start slowly up the stairs, the worried glances she throws over her shoulder at Steve, the reassuring nod he gives her.

There's the sound of her feet on the squeaky wooden floor of the upstairs hallway and then her door shutting. Dean pivots, spearing Steve on icy green eyes.

"What the hell."

"Dean--"

"Two months," Dean says. "No word from you for two. Months. Emma thought you were dead."

Steve winces. "Not dead, just--"

"On ice?" Dean says. "Underground? You didn't think, I don't know, a _hey, I'm alive_ would've been nice? You gonna tell me you still haven't figured out how to work a phone, gramps?"

"No," Steve says. "There wasn't an excuse. I don't have one."

Dean falters, lip coming out to swipe across his lip and getting caught under his teeth. He stares at Steve. "What?"

"I don't have an excuse," Steve says again. He looks distressed, though it's blunted by the dark circles beneath his eyes and the new lines at the corner of his mouth behind the beard. "I should've tried to let you know earlier."

Dean's still, his eyes searching Steve's. Then he loosens, slightly, his fists uncurling at his sides. He clears his throat.

"I'm sorry," Steve says.

"Yeah," Dean says. "Damn right you are." He clears his throat again. Sticks his hands in his pockets like he's not sure what else to do with them. "So…what're you…"

Steve waits patiently for him to finish the question. He looks so tired, but he's still standing there, waiting for Dean to finish, and Dean clenches his fists again. In Steve's coat this time, hauling him in close to kiss him. A laugh of relief unknots in his throat.

But Steve sort of stiffens. And Dean stops just shy of pushing their mouths together, looking up at Steve to search his face. He looks pained again, even as he looks regretful and apologetic, and Dean lets go.

"Dean," Steve says quietly.

Dean shakes his head, stepping back. "Go on," he says, tone abruptly all business. His hands go back into his pants pockets. "What is it?"

"Bucky," Steve says. "Dean, Bucky's alive."

 

Dean is silent when he finishes explaining.

"You're looking for him," he says finally. Like Sam, he doesn't seem to consider that there could ever be any other option.

Steve nods.

"And you--I mean--Christ." Dean runs one hand through his hair, then the other. It's gotten longer since the last time Steve saw him, softer like he's stopped gelling it up. "Can I even help?"

Steve shakes his head almost before he's aware of doing it. "No," he says sharply and watches the hurt flash across Dean's face. "It's not safe. Dean, it seriously, seriously is not safe."

"Pretty sure I've taken worse things than humans," Dean says stubbornly.

"The pieces of filth that did this to Bucky aren't human."

Dean does a double-take at the rage in Steve's voice. "All the more reason--"

"All the more reason not to let them HYDRA near either of you." Steve clenches his jaw. "Dean, I don't want them anywhere near Emma."

Dean's face is impassive, but his hands are white-knuckled. "Then why'd you even come here?" he mutters, moving to the coffee maker on the counter.

"I just wanted to--" Steve watches him pour the old coffee out of the carafe, spoon fresh grounds into a new filter. "I wanted to see you. Before we…"

"Before you leave," Dean says. His head is bent over the coffee maker; the back of his neck is bare and freckled above the faded red collar of his shirt. He doesn't turn even when the dark coffee begins streaming steadily into the empty carafe. Just turns over his hands, palms up, and studies them. "Okay. Well, you know the way upstairs."

Steve makes to reach for him. This time it's Dean's turn to stiffen.

"Don't," he says.

Steve lowers his hand. After one last glance at Dean, he heads up the stairs.

 

He reads one last bedtime story to Emma. It's one of her Care Bear books, about Professor Coldheart building a fountain that turns people's hearts to ice. Part of the way through the story, when the little boy's friend takes a drink from the fountain and loses all his feelings, Emma crawls up against his side and curls up there with her hand over his heart. Her ear presses there, against the steady tired thump of it.

He puts his hand over hers and feels the low thrum of his voice through his chest and her hand as he finishes the story, reads aloud the happy ending with its reminder that it's always better to have feelings, even when they hurt.

He closes the book. Emma's hand stays tight around his shirt. He looks down at her shiny dark blonde hair, her wide, expectant eyes.

"You're leaving."

Steve nods. Emma bites her lip and pushes slowly away from him, sliding back under her covers. "Is it for a bad guy?"

"It's for a good guy. I've got to save him."

Emma chews harder on her lip. "My daddy's a good guy."

"The best," Steve says firmly.

"Then why're you leaving?" she whispers. "It is 'cause 'a me?"

" _Emma_." Steve is horrified. He pulls her into a hug, pillow and blankets and stuffed animals and all. "Never. Never say that."

"Then why?" Emma mumbles into his shirt. Her voice is muffled and wet.

Steve presses her head to him. "You know how much you love your dad?" he says. She nods against his chest. "You'll always be there to take care of him, won't you?"

She nods again, more fervent this time. Sniffling.

"The guy I'm trying to find," Steve says. "He hasn't got anybody to take care of him. He's all alone."

Emma's still for a moment. Then she understands. "He needs you."

"Yeah," Steve says. "I think so."

They're both quiet for a minute, and then Emma tugs on his sleeve. Steve looks down in some confusion until he realizes she's pulling him closer. He leans down, and she smacks a kiss on his forehead.

"For the road," she explains. "Till you come back."

Steve's face splits into a very wide smile beneath his beard. He lowers his head to press his mouth to Emma's forehead for a long moment, inhaling the smell of no-tears shampoo and soft five-year-old skin. Then he pulls back and tucks her in again, blanket all the way up to her chin the way his mother and then Bucky would do for him on the nights he was cold and coughing, and he slips out into the hallway.

The hallway lamp is off, atop the lopsided oak credenza. Steve turns it on and looks down the hallway at Dean's bedroom door. It's shut, yellow lamplight visible in the crack underneath it, and it doesn't open when Steve walks deliberately across the creaking wooden floor to stand at the top of the stairs.

He waits for a moment, a dark figure limned in the lamp light.

Then he heads down the stairs.

 

The Captain America night light plugged into the furthest outlet in Emma's room suffuses the room with a soft white glow that doesn't quite reach the foot of her bed. But it casts her small fuzzy shadow across the wall when Emma sits up in bed.

She sits very still for a moment, ears straining. Then, like a flash, she darts from under her covers and streaks down the stairs.

Uncle Steve is slumped on the couch, asleep. Someone is standing above him who does not smell like her dad.

The man who isn't her dad looks up. Their eyes meet. They are both of them terrified and predatory as they stare at each other.

Emma lunges. The man who is not her dad shoves backward, crashing through the living room window out onto the side yard.

The crash wakes Steve, who jackknifes upright just in time to see Emma squirming out the broken window and taking off after a man-shaped shadow. She is in pursuit, and then Steve is, too, shoving up and grabbing his shield from beside the couch. He crashes out the front door and down the porch steps.

Dean is a minute later than the rest of them, woken by the noise and rushing downstairs and out the open door just in time to see Steve racing down the dark street.

"Emma!" comes his faint, distant shout.

Dean curses, sprinting back inside to grab his keys. He throws himself into the Impala, yanking her into gear and reversing out of the driveway with a wild shriek of rubber.

Four blocks away he catches up to Steve at the four-way intersection of Mockingbird and Hartford. He's white-faced, looking back and forth with his shield bobbing on his arm as his chest heaves with exertion, Emma bouncing from foot to foot at his side. Dean pulls up to the curb beside them sharply, surging out of the car.

"The fuck!" He snatches Emma up, staring at Steve, half angry and half alarmed. "What the hell is going on?"

Emma squirms, pushing at his chest like she's trying to make him set her down. "It was him," she says. Yellow is fading from the edges of her eyes, red dark beneath her skin. "Dad, it was _Bucky Barnes_!"

Steve catches her hand. "Emma, can you smell him?"

Dean steps back automatically. It takes Emma with him, her hand out of Steve's, and Steve's eyes flick to Dean's. Whatever he sees in them makes him step back, drop his hand back to his side.

Emma pays no attention to either of them. She struggles down out of Dean's suddenly weakened hold and bounds one way down the sidewalk, then the other. Then she takes off down Mockingbird.

Steve grips Dean's arm. He shakes it off, the terrified panic of Emma being pulled into a hunt that's not hers, and breaks into a run after her, Steve quickly outstripping him.

They end up at the edge of the neighborhood park. It's edged by oak trees, and Emma stops at the trunk of one, panting hard. Her eyes gleam a dull, predatory yellow in the orange wash from the streetlights half a block away.

"There?" Steve says softly.

She nods vigorously.

Steve glances back at Dean. Dean hangs back, not trying to get between either of them. He looks strangely small in his hoodie and flannel pajama pants, nothing but socks on his feet.

"Go to your dad, Emma," Steve says low, not quite commanding, but certainly stern. His eyes are already up in the branches of the tree, dark and obscured by shadows in the night.

Emma creeps back to Dean, who scoops her up automatically, stepping back.

Steve takes a deep breath and, with a single swift movement, hurls his shield up into the largest tree branch hanging above them.

The shield falls back down to deposit itself into the leaf-covered dirt a few yards away with a dull thud and crackle of leaves. At the same time, a few things fall and flutter, respectively, from the branch. Steve waits until they hit the ground before squinting up at the branch, seeing no shapes in it, and crouching to pick up the objects that have fallen to the ground. Three protein bar wrappers, unspotted by time or grime; a cheap steak knife, like the kind you might buy at the grocery store. And a museum map, creased so thoroughly it unfolds on his knee without him touching it, opening to a description of the Captain America exhibit.

He turns it over in his hand. Tilts his head back to squint up at the branch again.

Behind him, Emma says, "He's gone."

 

There is a fight. Emma wants to go with Uncle Steve to look for his Bucky. Uncle Steve says she can't. Dean stays in the kitchen and makes toast with numb fingers.

Emma sulks over her plate of toast. Steve says she can go to her room if she's not willing to eat the food other people aren't fortunate enough to have. She stomps upstairs, making her displeasure known, and slams her door. Dean grips the counter and closes his eyes over the sink.

He can feel Steve behind him. Beside him. Then the quiet "I'm sorry" and the footsteps creaking across the floor and the front door closing gently.

"Shit," Dean tells the sink. "Shit."

 

That night and the next few afterward see Emma trying to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night. Dean hears her the first night, staring at the ceiling in the dark from his pillow and sitting up when he hears her door opening quietly. He follows her silently downstairs, staying just far enough not for her to scent him, watching her tiptoe into the kitchen with her Fisher Price binoculars around her neck over her winter coat, and pull a chair almost soundlessly over to the pantry to reach the cookies from the top shelf. She puts two in one pocket and two in another and turns around. Sees him.

He's too tired to make a crack about her taking snacks to eat on the run. And maybe she sees some of that in his face, because she suffers herself to be picked up and carried back to bed. She jams her chin unhappily into his shoulder and does not speak. Her unhappiness is a tangible thing, like a wave, like heat, emanating from her and into him.

The next night, he sits on the couch that still smells faintly of Steve, pretending to sleep. He sits up when the back door clicks very quietly closed, and follows her out onto the street. Follows her down it, watching her crumble the cookies from her pocket to leave a trail behind her as she follows a scent only she can smell, her silhouette dark and tiny under the streetlights. He feels like a predator. He feels like prey. He feels like something useless, dead meat on the side of the road.

He watches her lose the trail. Watches her retrace her steps. Can imagine the bit of cookie getting damper and damper in her little sweaty hand, the chocolate chips melting and smearing on her fingers. Watches her stamp her foot in frustration, and sit down in the middle of the concrete and start to cry.

He steps out of the shadows and comes and picks her up and her tears are angry against his coat.

 

Barnes watches these interactions take place. He watches from trees and from rooftops and is careful to keep himself smeared with soil and the scent of tree bark so that the strange child will never catch his scent again after that first night. He watches, and at first it is because he thinks it may be a Mission. He thinks he has been sent after children who are not like other children before. He is not sure. It is hard to remember. It is hard to forget.

The father follows the child night after night. Night after night he picks it up when it gives up. They go home. Barnes follows them and watches their silhouettes through the curtain upstairs as the man puts the child back into the bed.

On some nights they don't go upstairs. On some nights, they fall asleep in the room downstairs with shifting light from the television visible through the curtained window. And on one night, the child emerges without its parent.

Barnes waits. He waits until the child has reached the end of the driveway, he waits until it has reached the end of the block. He waits, and when the father still does not emerge from the house, he creeps to the edge of the rooftop.

He could--should?--enter the house to assess the status of the father and why he has not followed the child. He should--could?--follow the child.

The Mission spoke to both of them. The Mission kissed both of them.

The child asked to go with the Mission.

Barnes follows the child.

 

The child goes further than it has on any of the previous nights. All the way past the small recreational park that children play in during the day and out into the larger, darker streets with the streetlamps spaced further apart. Barnes stays carefully downwind, instead smelling the increasing scent of distress and fear from the child as it begins to shiver in the cold.

Still it walks, although it has run out of the food crumbs it was dropping before. It walks, and then, as though even though it cannot smell him it still senses him, a presence dogging its footsteps, it begins to run. Hitching breath, stumbling steps, down the wide dark road.

Barnes speeds his stride to keep up.

 

There is a fueling station with an attached restaurant located two miles down the road. Barnes viewed it two days ago in his reconnaissance. Then, it was empty except for a mini-van and a four-door sedan stopped for gas. Now, it has several cars and several motorcycles parked outside it, their metal fenders gleaming in the alternating blue and red lights of the O-P-E-N and I-C-E-C-O-L-D-B-E-E-Rsigns in the window.

There are two people in the small brick space between the bar and the station. One is on her knees; the other has his back to the wall. They are not defensible positions.

"What the fuck!" says the man suddenly. He grabs himself and shoves his pants back up.

"Gimme the money," says the woman.

"I didn't come!"

"Not my fault."

"There's a kid right fucking there--" he begins indignantly, and Barnes glimpses the child, darting around the side of one of the parked cars as the man starts after her.

He straightens up. Adjusts his path to intersect with the man's.

The man bounces backward off the Weapon. He looks dazed for a second, then angry, then he just stares at Barnes as Barnes stares back.

"That your kid?" he says after a moment.

Barnes keeps looking at him.

"Well--keep a--keep an eye on--whatever," the man mutters, and pivots and walks away. To a four-door sedan parked in front of the pay phone, and gets in and slams the door.

Barnes watches the car reverse and pull away. He can still hear the shaking, uneven breaths of the child. When the car is gone, he turns and follows them.

They are coming from one of the big silver cylinders labeled VACCUUM. The child is huddled behind it, and when he comes around the long shadow of the cylinder, it looks up with wide yellow eyes that do not match any of the uncertain memories that drift and dart like fish through Barnes' mind.

The child stares at him. Barnes looks back, uneasy, and the child says,

"Uncle Bucky?"

 

Dean wakes to the buzz of his phone. He startles upright with dread already heavy in his gut. He knows he's missing something. He registers the darkness of the room, the fact that it's night--oh God. Oh God, he's missed Emma taking off.

He's already dressed, has gone back to the old habit of wearing clothes and shoes to sleep on top of the bed. He nearly snaps his cell phone flipping it open as he races downstairs. "Yeah?"

"Daddy?"

"Emma! Emma, where are you?" He throws himself into the Impala. Emma doesn't sound upset, exactly, but there's the strain in her voice of recent tears, the blunted edge that kids' words get when their noses are still full of snot and the back end of tears.

"We're at the gas station. Can you come get us?"

Panic thunders through him. He presses the gas pedal all the way to the floor. "Who's we, Emma?"

"Me," she says, "and Uncle Bucky."

 

Dean goes pale when he gets out of the car and sees them. They sit on the curb by the AIR and VACCUUM signs, or Emma's sitting--the man behind her is just shadow, and the gleam of metal all along his side. Emma is holding his hand.

He closes his hand around the gun inside his jacket. "Emma, come here."

The man Steve's been looking for starts to withdraw into the darkness outside the gas station lights, to be swallowed by it. But Emma won't let go of his hand. "No, Daddy, he's _hungry_."

"Then you and me'll go inside and buy him some food." Dean tries to keep his voice calm. "C'mon. You can pick some donuts for him."

"He doesn't want donuts," Emma protests. "I told him you make really good bacon, and omelets, Daddy, I said he could eat breakfast with us, I _promised_!"

Someone coming out of the gas station's brightly lit entrance has paused, looking at them. Dean stays still for another moment; then he says, "Get in the car. Both of you."

 

Nothing happens on the four-minute drive home. They both sit in the back seat, and the man Steve said is Bucky doesn't make any effort to sit outside of the rearview mirror. Dean glances at him at least a hundred times, taking in the mostly empty eyes, the hunger-sloped bones of his face.

At home, he doesn't dare leave them alone long enough to call Steve. Not long to make a real breakfast, either. He reaches into the pantry and refrigerator instead, eyes pinned to the soldier where he stands silently next to the table. He pours them all bowls of cereal and says, "Sit," and then, "Eat."

The soldier's stomach begins to growl on the second bowl of Lucky Charms. It's still growling after four bowls. But there's another sound with it, and although the soldier's face doesn't show it, there's a stillness, a tension, to his arms that wasn't there before.

Dean recognizes it. Something from a long time ago, from when he used to sit in motel rooms night after night watching his brother. He gets the mixing bowl in front of Barnes just in time.

The sounds of retching fill the kitchen. Dean says, "Emma, get us some water?" quietly. She slips away, and Dean watches the way Barnes tries to keep his eyes open as he retches, as he tries not to let them close, watches a blood vessel burst in one and turn his eye dark, startling red.

Emma comes back with a glass of water and a wet washcloth. Dean says, "Keep hold of them for a second, okay?"

He doesn't murmur as Barnes throws up, the way he does when Emma's throwing up, doesn't stroke his hair back like he does hers. He just watches, and waits, holds the guy's nearly-empty cereal bowl steady on the tabletop to try to catch the worst of it.

 

When Uncle Bucky is finally done throwing up, Dad takes the bowl into the kitchen. Emma hears him throw the whole thing into the trash and open the dishcloth drawer, turn on the water.

She creeps closer to Uncle Bucky with her own wet washcloth, still holding the glass of water. He looks at her, and she sets down the water and pets his head because his breath is fast and jagged, like the kids in her class when they're about to cry.

He doesn't move under her petting. He just stares at her, his eyes half-shut and mouth open, lolling like the dogs Aunt Amelia lets her stroke when Emma visits her office. He reminds her of the really old, tired ones, that kind Aunt Amelia says are ready to go to a better place.

She makes her petting gentler. His hair is rough and tangly. There's stuff stuck in it like twigs and leaves, and she starts to pull them out as Daddy comes in and starts to wipe down the tablecloth. It makes everything smell sharp and clean like the lemon soap by the sink. Uncle Bucky breathes and makes a long, rattling sound, and is very still.

"All right," Daddy says when he's done. He's taken off his hoodie; there are dark water spots splattered across the front of his t-shirt. "How about a bath? Huh? Em, you wanna go get a bath started for us?"

Emma pets Uncle Bucky's head again. "Do you wanna take a bath, Uncle Bucky?"

He stares at her. His face doesn't change a lot, but his eyes slide closed, a little, and she decides that means yes.

"Do you like it hot or cold?" She thinks cold is better, but Daddy always starts it warm and says she can stay in until the water gets cooler.

Uncle Bucky shudders. She decides that means hot. She hands Daddy the cup of water and heads upstairs.

The water has turned hot enough to turn the mirror foggy by the time he and Uncle Bucky come upstairs. Uncle Bucky is trembling finely, his eyes downcast away from all of them, and Emma comes forward to hold onto his hand, pull him toward the water.

"Look," she says, dipping her fingers in and touching them to his arm to show him how warm the water is. "Is this good? You can stick your toes in to check."

"We got this part," Daddy says. He's using his firm voice, the one that always makes Emma worry that he's mad. She pulls her hands back to herself. "You wait outside, okay, Em? How about you go find Clue for us to play?"

Emma's eyes widen.

Daddy doesn't say anything else. He just raises his eyebrows at her.

"Okay," she says, and scurries out of the bathroom.

 

It feels like a really long time before Daddy comes for her. In the basement, behind the washer and the dryer, in the little closet made of cold metal with all sorts of symbols Emma doesn't know painted on the walls. They make her feel tingly, kind of, but none of them hurt: Dad had asked her, over and over again, the first time he brought her here: Are you okay? Are you okay? Emma, does it hurt? Tell me if it hurts.

It didn't hurt. It just felt _weird_.

When the special knock comes on the door: one-two, one, three, Emma scrunches up in the corner anyway, nails dug into her palms. When Daddy opens the door, his arms full of a blanket and two pillows, she whaps his bare arm with the long silver spoon she had grabbed from the hook on the wall.

"Good girl," he says, and pulls the door shut behind him. He picks her up, and he holds her tighter than usual. She doesn't say anything, just scrabbles over his shoulder to put the spoon back on the hook, and then she looks hard at his face and says, " _Christo_."

Nothing happens. He lets out a little laugh, more a breath than anything, and puts his back against the wall, slides down it until they're sitting on the floor. He arranges the blanket over him, and one of the pillows behind his back, all without letting go of Emma. His front is damp and warm from bathwater, and he still smells sour like throw-up, but Emma lets him hold her anyway.

"Good," he says again. "You did real good, Emma."

She nods against his chin. He's told her what to do if something happened when she touched him with the spoon, or when she said _Christo_ , but she doesn't know if she can do them. She's shaking a little, too.

After a while, she pulls back. "Did you read Uncle Bucky a bedtime story?"

Daddy's quiet for a minute. "Not tonight."

"Okay," Emma says quietly. She pushes her head back under his chin. "Are we having a sleepover?"

"Yup." Dad shifts a little, gets the other pillow into the corner for her head. He's started stroking her hair back from her forehead; it's making her eyelids heavy. "Sorry I forgot the popcorn."

"Grr," Emma says sleepily. She's going to say something else, she thinks, but she falls asleep.

 

When she wakes up, Daddy's head is tipped backward against the wall, blood bobbing in his throat. His eyes dart behind his eyelids. Emma watches them for a minute, quiet and still under the blanket that's still pulled snug over her shoulder, then she slides carefully out of his lap.

The iron door is heavy, but not too heavy for her. She braces her shoulder against it, hard, and looks over her shoulder as she pushes to make sure Daddy doesn't wake up. He shifts, a little, with a murmur, but just slumps further under the blanket.

Emma closes the door very carefully behind her, and pats all the salt line back into place in front of it to keep Daddy safe. Then she goes up the basement stairs, and through the dark kitchen, and follows the smell of her Johnson & Johnson shampoo all the way into her room.

It's dark there, too, except the soft blue and white and red glow from her Captain America shield nightlight in the corner. It illuminates her bed, messy and unmade, and a shadow in the corner, tucked between her play kitchen and her bookshelf.

Uncle Bucky isn't sleeping. His dark eyes follow her from beneath his hair, which is fluffy and tangled. Daddy must not have used Emma's detangling spray to comb it out after his bath.

Emma squats down by him, curling her fingers and toes into her fuzzy pink rug. "Hi," she says.

Uncle Bucky doesn't say anything. He just looks at her.

"Do you wanna use my hairbrush?" Emma says. "I promise I haven't got lice, Ms. Holtz checked us all last month."

Uncle Bucky keeps watching her. Emma thinks he looks more like the pets at the pound, now, the ones that aren't quiet because they're sick, just quiet because nobody adopted them yet.

She keeps asking Daddy how come they can't get a dog. He says it's a long story. Emma says she wants to hear the story but he always says time for bed, Emma, maybe later.

She pushes back onto her feet and tiptoes out of her room to the bathroom, rocking up on her feet to reach her detangling spray where it's next to the faucet. Her comb is there, too, next to the soap dish, so she grabs it and pitter-patters back to her room. Uncle Bucky's still there, though he's closed his eyes.

"Okay," Emma says, squatting down next to him, and because Daddy always says it, "keep your eyes shut, okay?"

It takes her a few times to push down on the spray button right, but eventually she gets the hang of it, and she squirts it on Uncle Bucky's tangled hair, aiming for the ends first the way Daddy always does. It stays pretty tangled, so she sprays it some more, until it's dripping in beads down the ends of Uncle Bucky's hair onto the gray t-shirt he's wearing.

"I picked this one 'cause it smells like rainforest," Emma tells Uncle Bucky as she starts spraying his other side. "Another one smelled like cupcakes, except it said it was supposed to smell like coconuts, but I don't like it when stuff that isn't food smells like food. Do you like that, Uncle Bucky? Daddy does, he's always buying things that smell like bacon. One time we were at this flea market and they had toothpaste that said it tasted like bacon and he bought that only it smelled _awful_. Uncle Sam says that's 'cause bacon is just pig fat and pig fat doesn't smell good, but Daddy says Uncle Sam only eats rabbit food so he wouldn't know. I think Uncle Steve likes bacon because he always makes it when he's here but one time he told me he likes Canadian bacon better, 'cept I don't know what that is."

She rocks back on her heels, considers him for a minute, then starts spraying some more. "Have you ever seen a toucan? We went to the zoo at my first school and we saw a real live one. Javier said they're the only animals in the world vampires are scared of 'cause toucans eat vampires whenever they turn into bats, but Daddy says vampires don't live in the rainforest on account of there's too much sun. It seems like you don't like the sun either, though, and you're really strong and Uncle Steve said you're as old as him, are you a vampire?"

"No."

"Oh," Emma says. She puts down the spray bottle and starts picking Uncle Bucky's slimy, spray-soaked hair out of its snarls with her fingers, knot by tiny knot. She does that for a few more minutes, then says, "I was kinda hoping you were."

Uncle Bucky looks at her from beneath his dripping bangs.

"Only," she says to his hair, "only it's just that I'm the only person like me and it would've been nice to have somebody else."

Uncle Bucky doesn't say anything. Emma keeps tugging, gently, and putting each hank of hair aside as she pulls the knots out, and that's how they sit until Dean finds them a while later, bursting into the room breathing like he's just run a marathon.

 

He stands there, panting, unable to make a quick move lest he startle some reciprocal action from the Soldier. But Emma just looks over her shoulder at him, craning her neck, and says, "Daddy, I gave Uncle Bucky a fishtail braid!"

"A fishtail braid?" he echoes automatically. "That's great, baby. How 'bout you come over here by me?"

Emma shifts on her knees in their pink Hello Kitty flannel pants, considering. The movement reveals more of the Winter Soldier, and the way Emma has neatly braided his hair and pinned it at the bottom with a bright green frog barrette.

Dean stares. Then Emma takes the Soldier's hand in both of hers and digs her feet into her rug to pull him to his feet.

For a minute, the soldier doesn't move. Then, in a single fluid motion that has Dean's hand shooting automatically to his waistband and the gun he didn't remove from his back the night before, he's on his feet, standing with his hand still in Emma's.

His eyes meet Dean's for a minute from beneath his pulled-back hair before they slide away again. They settle on the wall behind Dean, and Dean stares at him for another minute, his heartbeat thudding against his ribs and against the cold metal barrel digging against the knobs of his spine.

"Can we have _real_ breakfast this time?" Emma's plaintive voice breaks the spell. Dean's hand falls away from his gun, and he steps back, toward the door. Emma pulls Bucky past him. "We want bacon!"

 

They don't have bacon, and even if they did, Dean doesn't think it would be such a good idea, after the way Barnes threw up his cereal. He microwaves them some packages of cream of wheat he finds in the back of the pantry instead, from the last time Amelia was here to pick Emma up for a visit, and Barnes eats his slowly with his flesh hand, like he remembers the same thing Dean does.

Emma pouts over hers until Dean dumps like half a bag of brown sugar into her bowl, at which time she fishes out the clots of melting brown sugar and eats those, leaving half of the cream of wheat behind. Steve would call her out on it, he's all about not wasting food, but Dean's tired, okay, he's fucking tired and he's got no clue what he's doing, he should call Steve, he knows he should call Steve, he _wants_ to call Steve, but Bucky Barnes came to _them_. He could have gone to Steve, since he's obviously been following the guy. But he didn't come out when Steve was looking for him, he came out only once he was gone. On the one hand that's fucking terrifying and on the other it's completely understandable, because Dean can remember the way he clung to Ben after Sam, the way listening to Ben chatter and the way he didn't expect anything but for Dean to pay attention to him felt safe, like being inside a bubble, muffled and safe.

When the bowls have been scraped clean of their wheat except for Emma's, and there's light coming through the window blinds, Barnes looks up. His bangs have turned feathery now that they've dried, quivering over his forehead like the crest of some strange bird, and Dean might laugh if the situation wasn't so damn messed-up, if Barnes' fingers didn't have a fine tremor where they sat on the table.

"Did you tell him."

His voice is unexpectedly low, _Cas_ , and Dean catches his breath, clenches his fingers in his jeans beneath the tablecloth.

Barnes doesn't say anything more. He watches Dean, and there is dread in his gaze, behind the silent, dead-eyedness of it, and Dean remembers the terror that sat in his gut every time Cas appeared after Hell, the pure animal terror that he would tell Sam what Dean had done in Hell.

"Do you want me to?" Dean asks.

Emma gasps and rocks to her knees like she can't believe they’re even discussing this. "But Uncle Steve's looking for you!"

Barnes looks ridiculously young with his feathered hair and his braid pulled into the frog barrette. His mouth twists, lips white and bloodless, and he looks away, metal hand working uselessly on the tabletop beside him, before forcing his gaze back to Dean.

"I haven't," Dean says. "I won’t."

 

He sends Emma upstairs to get ready for school. She folds her arms over her chest and glares at him first, shooting betrayed looks between him and Barnes that he ignores. Barnes' shoulders hunch, though, and Dean's not sure whether to be pissed at his kid for making a motherfucking brain-cauterized assassin feel bad for disappointing her or pissed at Barnes for letting a five-year-old make him feel like shit.

"Emma," he snaps, sharp. "Uniform. Now."

Emma glares at him some more. But she slides down out of her chair, movements slow and defiant to telegraph her displeasure, and then she stomps over to Barnes. She sticks out her hand, pinky finger extended.

Barnes looks down at it.

Emma shoves it closer to him, practically in his face. "Promise you'll be here when I get home."

Barnes just looks at her. Then he looks at Dean, who pretends to be absorbed picking up all their bowls but is really trying to figure out if his kid is really brave or just Winchester-level stupid, Jesus Christ.

Barnes doesn't say anything. He lets Emma link their pinky fingers, though, and shake once, decisively, and Emma nods and marches upstairs.

Dean putters around the kitchen, rinsing out the bowls and putting them in the dishwasher, until Emma stomps back downstairs in her khaki uniform jumper and blue polo shirt. He grabs his coat and hers from the hook near the door and holds the door open for her as she waits there imperiously. She heads outside to the car, thumbs hooked in her backpack straps, leaving Dean to follow her.

He hesitates a minute in the doorway, looking back at the kitchen table where Barnes still hasn't moved from his chair. Or in his chair. "Don't--" he begins, then stops, because he doesn't know what don't.

He locks the door behind him, instead, and heads down the porch steps into the chill autumn air.

 

When he gets back, Bucky is still at the table. The light has shifted, sunlight no longer shafting through the mostly-closed blinds, and Barnes is a silhouette in his chair, a curve of head and neck and spine, looking down at his hands.

Dean walks around him to the kitchen. He picked up Pedialyte on the way back, in case Barnes' stomach freaks out on them again, and bacon, and he opens the fridge to put them inside.

There's a knife against his carotid.

Dean tenses.

"You shouldn’t let me stay here," Barnes rasps against his ear.

Dean draws his upper lip under his teeth, for a minute. Then he releases it.

"I didn't exactly get a choice," he breathes. The blade nicks his skin as his throat bobs with his words. It stings. "You saw how Emma is."

A moment of nothing. Then Barnes' voice like a blade scraped down bone. "I should leave."

"Gonna break your promise to her?"

Barnes stiffens. He pulls back, and Dean pivots to face him, Taurus drawn, safety released.

Barnes stares at it, expressionless. Then, jerky, like it goes against every instinct he has, he sets his knife down on the counter.

Dean slides it toward himself slowly. Then, when he has a good grip on it, he tosses it into the kitchen sink. It clatters there and is still.

Barnes sinks to the floor, arm wrapped around himself, hand digging into his scalp. A low, inhuman sound comes from so deep inside him that Dean flashes back to Hell, fingers sweaty and slick.

He drags them down his jeans. "I got you," he says, "I got you," and squats there with him on the floor, hands splayed open. "I got you, Sarge."

 

Days pass. None of them are easy, but none of them are too horrible, either: No one gets killed, no one gets hurt, aside from the gouges Barnes digs into the sides of his face, sometimes, when he has been left still too long, has stared at the television or the wall or the books Dean brings him from the public library for hours and hours without moving.

He eats, and sleeps, and occasionally shakes, but mostly he just sits. In the corner or under the table or in other, small spaces that are harder to find.

At night he sleeps in Emma's room. They find him in the corner the first few mornings, sitting up, watching them with darkening circles under his eyes. Then Emma insists on tucking him into her bed one night, amid her zoo of stuffed animals, and he moves carefully, gingerly, eyes down, trying not to sit upon any of them as she piles her teddy bears and stuffed tigers and stuffed toucans and penguins and blue jays and cows and turtles on top of him. When she's done, there's nothing but his nose poking out from between a stuffed koala bear and a Chococat, and Emma pulls the blanket over all of them, tucking the massive lump and saying, "Good night, Uncle Bucky, sleep tight!"

The next morning, when they come in, the lump is still undisturbed on the bed, and Emma crawls up onto the bed to pull the blanket back, and excavate Barnes from her toys, starting first at the bottom and exclaiming when she finds his socked feet, like she is an archaeologist making a great discovery. When she gets to his face, there is something different about it, something less tense and scared, and Dean only goes a little rigid, in the doorway, when Emma crows in victory and swoops down to smack a kiss on Barnes' stubbled cheek. "I found you!"

It becomes a ritual each morning, Emma's uncovering of the Ancient Sargeasaurus, and sometimes--sometimes--something that is almost a smile touches Barnes' mouth as Emma pulls him up, as the stuffed animals tumble from around him and onto the floor.

Other mornings. Other mornings they go into Emma's room, having neatly made Dean's bed in his room where Emma is sleeping while Barnes is in hers, and the stuffed animals are scattered across the room. Some of them are torn open, their white fluff scattered across the fuzzy pink carpet, and Barnes is crammed beneath her desk, eyes squeezed shut.

On those mornings, Dean sends Emma to get dressed and start packing her lunch. He hunkers down on the floor a few feet from Barnes, his bones creaking, and talks. Retelling stories Emma's told him, about the escapades of kids at her school: Mason who dipped his hair in someone's hot chocolate to dye it brown, Tanisha who chipped her front tooth jumping off the see-saw, Otani who asked Emma to marry him in March with a ring made out of bright pink duct tape and a macaroni noodle.

He tells Barnes the stories until Emma creeps back upstairs in socks that don't match and her school jumper a little lopsided. Then Dean creaks to his feet and drives her to school and drives back, and sometimes when he comes back, Barnes has moved down to the kitchen table and is staring at a cup of coffee; sometimes he's in the shower, steam billowing out into the hall; and sometimes he's still under Emma's desk, unmoving.

 

Emma treats it like a game of hide and seek when she comes home and Barnes is nowhere to be found. She looks under the tables and behind the couches and beneath the beds and inside the kitchen cabinets until she finds him, looking back at her from inside the darkness of wherever he's secreted himself to be still and quiet. Sometimes Emma squirms in after him, and sometimes she just says, "Found you!" and scampers away again, as if inviting him to join the game.

Eventually, he does. He'll be out and about in the kitchen or living room all day, but when Dean gets up to grab his keys and coat to pick Emma up from school in the afternoon, he disappears. Emma runs up the porch steps when Dean brings her home, and throws her backpack down in the front hallway and charges up and down the hallways and the stairs in search of Uncle Bucky. There is a gale of laughter when she finds him--on one memorable day, she pitter-patters back outside, onto the front walk, and tilts her head all the way back until Dean, following her outside, sees Barnes perched on top of the roof, peering back down at them with a gleam in his eyes that seems almost playful. He slides back down, flipping over the porch eave fluidly, and lands in front of Emma in a crouch; she squeals and jumps onto him, throwing her arms around his neck.

 

At night Dean lies awake as Emma snores against her pillow next to him. She turns and snuffles in her sleep, muttering petulantly about Canadian geese and "I don't _want_ any turnips, Daddy," and Dean smiles, painful, stretched, up at the ceiling even as he wonders what the fuck he's doing. Thinks of Steve and how he's going to hate Dean, regardless of how this turns out; how he would hate anyone who knew Sam was back and didn't tell him; how he hated Bobby and Samuel Campbell and Cas for it.

_why would you do that_

_why did you not love me enough to tell me_

But Barnes asked. He asked, and Dean knows how much need that takes.

 

On a morning in November. Dean trails Emma into her room, and they both stop short in the doorway, looking at the empty bed with its stuffed animals placed back in neat rows against her pillows and tucked beneath her blanket.

Dean's stomach sinks.

Then Emma tilts her head. She pivots under Dean's arm and darts past him down the stairs.

Barnes is in the kitchen. Barnes is at the stove frying something in the big black cast-iron skillet.

Emma scrambles up his leg to see what it is. She scrambles up his metal arm like its nothing, digging her fingers beneath the gleaming plates to use them as handholds. Dean steps forward, mouth opening to order her down, not sure how Barnes will react, when he's so careful not to use that arm otherwise, but Barnes just lifts it higher without looking away from the skillet in his flesh hand, the metal rippling. Emma bursts into laughter and kicks her legs happily as she dangles from his elbow like she's on the monkey bars.

Friggin' messed-up assassin can make his kid laugh more than Dean's ever been able to, and he chews on his cheek and goes to the opposite counter to start making coffee.

"You want any, Sarge?"

Barnes nods, bouncing his metal arm up and down so that Emma shrieks and makes other high-pitched sounds of delight as she swings back and forth.

They sit at the table, when the coffee and Barnes' eggs are done, and they're fluffy and bright yellow in the sunlight that streams across the table.

 

Garth calls. He's found another someone whose deal is coming due, it'll work this time, Dean, I _know_ it.

Dean lowers the phone after they hang up. He looks at the back of Barnes' head where he sits at the kitchen table working his way through a history book from the eighties that Dean found for fifty cents at the public library.

There's no one. Not really. He wouldn't dump a possibly unstable ex-assassin on Jody even if she agreed to it, and Sam's been quite clear how he feels about what Dean's doing, and even if he--if he--

But he doesn't. So Dean doesn't have to think about whether he would trust Bucky with his brother.

 

He goes and picks Emma up from school early. She knows what it means; she comes into the front office silent and not looking at him, clutching her lunchbox and her backpack straps. She turns her head away from him as he buckles her into the back seat.

Barnes is still at the table when they get home. Emma runs to him, scrambling up into his lap and hiding her face in his neck.

Dean doesn't meet his eyes. He sets Emma's backpack and her still-full lunchbox down next to the table, instead, and nods once at nothing in particular before going upstairs.

 

He sits down on the edge of Emma's bed. He doesn't like to pray in his room to Cas anymore, like it's some sort of desperate invitation. Cas made his choice, and Dean tries not to be bitter about it.

Sometimes he even succeeds.

"Hey," he says. "If you're not busy. Cas. I could use your help."

The near-silent flutter of wings. Dean opens his eyes, pulling his mouth from his knit knuckles, and meets Cas's eyes.

"Dean."

"Cas," he says. "You got time to keep an eye on some people for me?"

Cas tilts his head at him. But he follows Dean downstairs, to where Bucky sits in his chair with his head tilted back for Emma to pull her brush through it. There are a handful of Hello Kitty ponytails sitting on the table, waiting to be used in his hair.

Barnes' eyes take Cas in silently, flicking up and down and then over to Dean. Dean gives him a nod he means to be reassuring, and Barnes swallows but doesn't otherwise move.

Emma doesn't stop brushing his hair. "Hi, Mr. Cas," she says quietly.

"Emma," Cas says gravely. Then he looks at Dean. "I understand."

"Yeah?" Dean says shortly. What does he understand? That people get messed up, that humans do shitty things and the people they do them to keep trying to survive them, to breathe through shredded lips and trachea and lungs to suck in air that tastes like your own guts and always will?

Cas doesn't answer. "I will allow no harm to come to either of them," he says, and Dean guesses he can't really ask for much more than that. He grabs his packed duffel from the corner, and glances at Emma where she still won't look at him, and heads out the door.

 

When he comes back, his jaw is still clenched. Something is humming inside his hollowed-out bones, buzzing in his teeth. It jolts him like electricity, flickering along the dark lines creeping from the creases of his elbows. He tenses his shoulders, and his hands, and unlocks the front door.

He can still feel the hound's hot breath against his neck.

They are both on the couch, in front of the TV. Barnes looks toward him, and Emma, too; they both sit very still and watch him and do not move to get up.

Cas comes in from the kitchen. There is a serving spoon in his hand. His eyes take Dean in with their silent gaze, no doubt taking in whatever it is that lies along Dean's bones now.

"One more," he says.

"One more," Dean agrees, and takes the spoon from Cas. He goes into the kitchen and finishes stirring the pot of stew simmering on the stove. Takes out bowls and begins to serve it into them.

Cas has followed him in. He watches Dean take out spoons and pour milk into cups. "With whom will you leave her?"

Dean concentrates on not spilling any of the milk. He doesn't answer. He thinks maybe he's thought, sometimes, that Steve would take her. He thinks now that maybe he couldn't. Thinks that maybe the reason he let Barnes stay was the hope that he would.

Barnes can't even take care of himself. But sometimes you don't need to, Dean knows. Sometimes all you need to keep going is someone else to take care of.

"I see," Cas says quietly.

He stays for dinner with them. Not eating but just sitting quietly at the table. When they're done, he presses his chapped lips to Dean's forehead and disappears.

 

Dean goes up to his room soon afterward. He is too numb to cry himself to sleep.

 

When he wakes up, it's to the smell of coffee. He rolls over, under his covers, and sees the steaming mug on his nightstand and Barnes on the floor, leaning against the drawers.

"Emma is ready for school," he says in his quiet voice.

"Yeah?" Dean winces as he pulls himself out of bed, swinging his legs over the side. His bones feel heavy now, like the electricity from the night before has settled into sediment inside the marrow. His ankle has swollen, too, during the night, to a mournful puffy red.

Barnes takes it in with his silent gaze, and gets up soundlessly and returns a moment later with ACE wrap from the medicine cabinet in his hands. He crouches and tapes Dean's ankle up, his thumbs certain and steady on Dean's skin, the metal of his one hand just a little cooler than his right. Heat crawls up the back of Dean's neck and behind his ears, and he curls forward, cups his hands hard beneath his knees, the tendons hard and rigid there.

"Sarge," he says.

Barnes looks up. His dark quiet eyes that are sometimes gray and sometimes blue.

"If something happened. Would you. Would you take care of Emma?"

Barnes' face goes stricken. It's covered nearly as quickly, his expression going flat and impassive again, but it doesn't matter: He's pulling back, and to his feet, and disappearing from the room.

Dean doesn't call after him. He sighs, and flexes his foot in its snug bandage, and limps downstairs.

 

When he comes back from taking Emma to school, Barnes is on the front steps. His chin is on his knees, and his hands are on those, curled into loose cups palm-up, like he is reading the lines carved into them.

He tells Dean, "Yes."

 

Sometimes, in bed at night, he wonders how his return from Hell might've been different if he'd been given the time just to be still. To sit inside Bobby's house or beneath his cars, hands busy instead of his brain. Would he have gone slowly mad(der), simmering in the memories, or would that have given them time to congeal, to harden and become brittle, like ceramic in the kiln.

 

Barnes starts to leave the house after that. Not far places. The cold, tiny stream that cuts across the empty lot half a mile down the road. The gas station that Dean takes the Impala to for gas because it's got the cheapest prices for premium gasoline. The school line, to drop off Emma in the mornings and pick her up in the afternoon. He sits in the passenger's seat, barely breathing inside his layers of jackets and his scarf and his ridiculous hat with the ear flaps that Dean found in some of Sam's old things in the Impala's trunk.

It's not until the fourth day that, when the teacher on patrol duty raises her mittened hand in a greeting, that he raises his own, tentatively, along with Dean's in a greeting back.

 

A few days later, he comes back from his walk to the stream with a newspaper under his arm. Dean raises his eyebrow from where he sits on the couch with a bunch of stuff from Bobby's library spread out in front of him but doesn't say anything. He listens, though, to the nearly inaudible scrape of a kitchen chair being pulled out and the crinkle of paper as Barnes turns the pages.

A while later, he comes into the living room. Dean looks up, pen dangling from between his lips.

Barnes gets down on his haunches. His thighs are sleek and powerful, lithe and beautiful in a way Dean rarely notices on other men. Steve is a sun, and Cas was the moon, but Barnes is human. Grim and worn and ragged and still here.

"These are the jobs I could do," Barnes says. Then a hesitation, a correction: "Have done. Are they…?"

Dean considers the painstakingly circled listings in the classified ads. Then he looks up at Barnes.

"Are you looking for permission?"

"Advice." It comes out like it takes effort. "What I would be…all right for."

"All of it." Dean eyes him, takes him in, then says, "Are you worried?" like it's only just occurred to him. "About being near people?"

Barnes' flinch is a nearly invisible thing.

"If you don't like it, you can quit," Dean says. Still watching him. "You can always quit, Sarge."

Barnes' metal hand curls into a tight fist on his knee. Dean doesn't say anything more. He takes the classified page and uses the yellow highlighter on the table to mark the contact information for the jobs.

Barnes watches him do it, his eyes quiet and watchful and fist slowly uncurling on his leg. He watches and then, abruptly, says, "You were never scared."

Dean looks up.

"That I would hurt her," Barnes clarifies. "Your--Emma."

Dean looks down. Bounces the highlighter against the paper. "I was plenty scared," he says. Chest tight. Because. Because Barnes might takes away his promise, once he knows. About--

"Nothing else has eyes like her," Barnes says. He is watching Dean. Like he can see the pressure rising in his chest.

"She's not--" Dean says. "She isn't--" He curls his own fist. "When I take off," he says. "And Cas comes. You know it's 'cause I have--"

"Missions," Barnes says quietly.

"Yeah. Sort of. And the things I fight, the things--they're not human, exactly."

Barnes' eyes are dark and intent.

"Emma's half mine," Dean says. "And she's half…not. And I knew you couldn't hurt her, 'cause the place I found her in--the place I carried her out of--"

"The place she dreams about."

Dean's breath catches painfully. Because he knows. Of course he knows. Between the mutterings about Canadian geese and turnips, there's other things, too, like _don't let him hurt me_ and trembling and low, quiet sounds of fear like the ones Barnes makes, sometimes, when Dean sits in the hallway outside of his room with his phone in his hand, Steve's number glowing weakly on the screen.  "Yes."

"Where?" Barnes is still looking at him so intently. "Where did she come from?"

"A bad place," Dean says. "A bad, scary place. I had to go there for a mission. And I've got… I've got another mission coming up that I dunno is gonna go so well."

"You're leaving."

Dean isn't sure if it's a question. He nods, his eyes on the classified ads, in case it is.

Barnes doesn't say anything for a while. Then he says, "It made me feel safer. That if I hurt her. She could hurt me back."

"Yeah," Dean says. "Me, too."

 

That next week. They've just picked Emma up from school and Barnes and Emma are at the kitchen table coloring while Dean surveys the refrigerator to see if he needs to go grocery shopping or not. The kitchen window is open, just a crack, to let the chilly air in, and through it comes the sound of a motorcycle's engine, pulling into the driveway.

Dean closes the fridge. Barnes is already half out of his chair, panic in his eyes.

"It's him," he whispers. Like it's Death come to take him instead of his best friend.

Dean doesn't say anything as the heavy footsteps creak up the porch steps. He just looks at Barnes, and Barnes looks back, and then Dean crosses the room and opens the door.

Steve looks up from the top step, helmet under his arm. His hair is flattened, stubble dark gold on his face, and he looks tired and disheartened, circles under faded blue eyes.

They slide past Dean, and--

"Bucky?"

Dean moves back.

Steve surges forward and grabs Barnes. He jams his face into his shoulder and hugs him so hard that someone spine cracks, loud and startling in the frozen room.

Emma stands to the side, staring at both of them. Dean motions her to him, bending to pick her up. He snags her coat and her boots on the way to the front porch, shutting the front door behind them to give Cap and Barnes some privacy.

Emma lets him put her boots on and bundle her up in her big purple coat as they sit on the stoop. "Daddy?"

"Yeah, babe."

"Is Uncle Steve going to come stay with us for good now?"

Dean hesitates. "You'll have to ask him that, kiddo."

"But he loves Uncle Bucky," Emma says. "And you. So why wouldn't he--"

"I don’t _know_!"

Silence rushes into the hole cut by his sharp voice. Behind them, the quiet up-and-down of voices inside--mostly Steve's, slightly higher and more audible than Barnes' low monosyllables--goes silent like they've heard. Heat and shame flood Dean's neck.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry, Em, I shouldn't have--"

Emma doesn't say anything. She presses her boots together and picks at the scuffed soles. Dean looks down at his own and thinks of how much better off she'll be with Bucky and Steve.

The sound of tires crunching over leaf- and slush-strewn asphalt brings his gaze sliding back up. There are two dark black SUVs approaching from opposite ends of the road, one stopping directly in front of the driveway and blocking the Impala and Steve's motorcycle inside it.

Dean stands up. "Em, go inside."

"But--"

There are men in suits getting out of the SUVs. None of them are holding up guns yet, but Dean can see they're armed. He moves his palm to his own, loosening it to be lifted out quickly.

"Sir," calls one of the men, walking closer. "We're not here to cause any trouble. We're just here to talk."

"That so?" Dean pulls his handgun out. He feels like Bobby, pulling a gun on his front porch and telling people to clear off his lawn. "You can talk from down there."

Three of the agents have pulled out their own firearms in response to Dean drawing his. The man in front who spoke doesn't; his arms stay loose at his sides.

"Are you aware that the man who has been staying with you and your daughter is an assassin?"

Steve bursts out the front door behind Dean, coming up beside him. His hand goes to Dean's forearm as though to quell him, and Dean shoots him a glare.

"Barnes hasn't done anything," he says. "Nobody's taking him anywhere."

It's a warning, in case Steve's planning to let himself and Barnes be taken into custody, because the moron has a hell of a lot more faith in the American government than Dean thinks anyone should have in anything. But Steve doesn't give him the stubborn jutted jaw that Dean's used to getting when Steve doesn't agree with him about something. He's presenting that jutted jaw to the agents, instead, moving down the first porch step.

"Thought Agent Carter was the only member of my surveillance detail," he says to the front-most agent.

"But this isn't just a surveillance detail, is it, Captain?" The agent's eyes remain friendly, though the absence of crinkles at the corners of them belie his tension. "Sergeant Barnes is inside that house."

Steve seems to relax slightly at that use of Bucky's title. "That's right," he says. "Sergeant Barnes is inside. Not the Winter Soldier."

"You understand we have to make sure of that ourselves." The agent motions one of his own forward with a forward tilt of his head.

"No," Dean says, stepping forward with his gun again and training it on the agent moving forward. "I don’t."

A long moment passes in which they all stare at each other.

Then the door creaks slightly open behind them. One of the agents shifts his gun immediately; Dean is faster, stepping between his barrel and the door. His heart is thudding hard and fast in his chest, adrenaline like a flavor bursting across his tongue even as his mouth goes dry in anticipation of the shot.

"Daddy--" It's Emma's voice, not Barnes, "he's gone."

Steve spins. Dean stays where he is for a moment, then realizes that if Barnes is gone, there's no point; he sweeps Emma up in one arm and steps backward into the house, letting the door fall shut behind them on the agents.

"Shit," Steve says. He's thundering back down the stairs, as if he's already checked the second floor. His fist is white-knuckled on the banister.

"We're good," Dean says. "We're good, Cap," and then the agents kick open the door, guns held in front of them to clear the room. Emma goes tense, and Dean holds her firmly, watches with narrow eyes as the men come the rest of the way in and proceed to search every inch of the house.

Steve stands there, fists and jaw clenched like he's in pain, and every time he seems about to do something, Dean catches his eye. Widens his eyes warningly. Steve's eyes bore into him; then he tears them away to look at the agents.

"Well?" he says at last, when the last pair of them come up the stairs from the basement. "Did you find anything?"

"You know that information's classified, Captain," the only agent who hasn't pulled his gun says.

Steve's jaw clenches further. But he doesn't say anything, and the agent turns to Dean.

"I imagine we'll be seeing more of each other," he says, and hands Dean a card. Dean glances at it just long enough to see the name beside the printed logo--Coulson. "In case you need to get in touch."

Steve goes to the front window to watch them get into their black SUVs. Dean sets Emma down, tells her to stay with Steve. Then he heads down to the basement himself, and then the upstairs, and last the first floor, clearing the rooms to make sure no agents have stayed behind. Then, in Emma's room, he tucks his gun into his waistband and bends to pull from under her bed the duffel that's been packed and ready for a while now.

He goes back downstairs. Emma is hovering next to Steve's legs uncertainly; his hands are still in fists at his sides; he's staring out the window at nothing.

"There're two agents out front," he says when Dean steps off the lowest stair.

"Then there's probably another out back," Dean says. At his tone, Steve turns. His eyes narrow on the duffel slung over Dean's shoulder.

"What--"

"Well, we're not staying here after all that," Dean says. "Obviously."

He hands Steve a torn-out sheet of paper.

_Gimme the shield and switch clothes._

They go into the cramped downstairs bathroom and strip quickly, trading Dean's leather jacket for Steve's and one pair of jeans for another. It smells of Steve, all of it, even the sturdy black boots as he bends to lace them up, and he stays bent like for a minute, forehead to his knee, just taking it in. Then he takes a deep breath, knots the laces, and straightens.

His t-shirt is too small on Steve, stretching across his chest, but the red, white, and blue flannel he pulls over it is one of Dean's larger over shirts, and it disguises the fit pretty well. Dean can't find it in him to smirk at the colors, just accepts the baseball cap from Cap and pulls it on, watching him turn Barnes' ridiculous ear-flapped hat over in his hands before pulling it over his blonde hair. He wonders if he can smell Barnes on it, the way Dean smells Steve on his clothes, then banishes the thought and crouches down in front of Emma.

They don't say anything, just stare at each for a minute, her eyes big and scared.

He remembers finding her in Purgatory during that first task with a soul swirling inside his arm, remembers how her big wide eyes were the only recognizable part of her, inside the dirt and dried blood caking her face. How she'd looked at his glowing arm like someone who is very hungry looks at a piece of food they will not be given to eat, and he'd thought of the story he'd read with Sammy one Christmas Eve at the public library while they waited for Dad to pick them up, about a little girl sitting outside a window getting colder and colder as the family inside ate warm goose and potatoes and pie.

He touches Emma's wrist. She shuffles forward to let herself be hugged. Digs her cold nose into the side of his face, and he presses his palm to her shoulder blade to hold her closer, feeling the frantic thrum of her heart in her small chest.

He lets go. She sniffles, once, and turns her face into Steve's pant leg.

Dean creaks to his feet in Steve's stiff, unfamiliar clothes. He hands him his aviator sunglasses and another sheet of paper, this one folded up four times. He traces _BARNES_ into Steve's hand with his finger before he hands it to him, and then he hands him his keys, too.

Steve hesitates a second, looking down at them and then at Dean. Dean holds out his own hand. After a second, his face going guarded and searching, Steve hands his own keys to him.

Dean picks up Steve's shield where it rests against the wall. It weighs a fucking ton, but he won't be carrying it long. He adjusts Steve's jacket sleeve under it and gives him a salute. Then he opens the front door and precedes them outside.

 

Uncle Steve tries to make Emma stay in the Impala while he goes up to the cabin. Emma shakes her head mutely and scrambles after him out into the dark. She clings to his pant leg as he walks through the overgrown weeds and grass. He smells like him and like Daddy and she holds on tighter, digging her face into the denim.

His big hand cups her head. "Stay back," he says softly as he stops in front of the door, and Emma inches back, hides herself behind one big leg as he kicks the door open with the other.

The door flies open, hitting the wall inside with a bang that makes Emma flinch. Uncle Steve's still for a minute, just breathing; Emma can hear his heart thud thud thud and the much quieter, no less rapid thrum of a heartbeat inside.

"Anyone here?" Uncle Steve says loudly into the darkness of the cabin.

There's no answer. He waits a minute, then steps inside. Emma clings to his leg, still; then, streaks forward to turn on the light she sees on the table, a plastic one like the kind Aunt Amelia keeps in her truck for emergencies.

The white glow fills the room, and Uncle Steve hisses, "Jesus _Christ_!"

She turns to look at what he's looking at. He's staring at where Uncle Bucky is standing in the corner of the tiny kitchen, the lantern light reflecting off his guarded eyes and the metal fingers peeking from his shirt sleeve.

"Christ," Steve says again. He sounds almost breathless. "Buck. You couldn't say something?"

Uncle Bucky doesn't say anything. His eyes flick toward Emma. She slides closer to the ground to sidle toward him, but Uncle Steve catches her by the back of her jacket.

"Wait," he says. "Wait. Bucky. Are you…?"

Uncle Bucky just looks past him, at the door. "Where is he?" His eyes flick to Emma.

Uncle Steve looks pained all over again. "He's not here yet?"

Uncle Bucky's eyes slide back to him. For a minute, he's quiet, and then, like he's pushing it out of his mouth: "Obviously."

Uncle Steve's grip on Emma loosens a bit. She looks up at him, and he's looking back at her, his lip tucked under his teeth. He looks sorry.

"He'll be here," he tells her. His voice is bright suddenly, and he picks her up, props her on his hip so he can meet her eyes. "Just you wait, he'll come tearing around the corner on my bike any minute."

Emma can't look at him. She looks at Uncle Bucky, instead, and he's watching her the silent way Mr. Cas does sometimes, like he's reading what's in her mind, how scared she is. She looks away from him, too.

Uncle Steve goes sort of still beneath her. She feels him look back and forth between her and Uncle Bucky, like he's reading both of their minds.

His arms go very tight. She sneaks a look at him and his jaw is tight, too, and his mouth, and his eyes are like blue fire.

Emma cringes. And there is an arm behind her, and she scrambles backward into it, wrapping herself around Uncle Bucky's shoulder. She can feel him trembling finely, like Uncle Steve being angry scares him, too.

Uncle Steve's eyes go wide, the fire going out of them as he looks at her, and Bucky. Now he looks like Daddy did after he snapped at her on the porch.

"I'm sorry," he says quickly. "I'm sorry. I'm not--" His eyes go to Uncle Bucky again; he opens his hands in front of him, showing them  empty. "Bucky. I won't. I wouldn't."

Uncle Bucky's still trembling a little. But he licks his lips. Says hoarsely, "Damn right you won't."

Uncle Steve stares at him, big-eyed. Then a smile creeps uncertainly onto his face, careful and scared.

"I--" His eyes flick to Emma and go very apologetic. "I'm sorry, Emma."

She swallows. Can't quite get any words around how it feels like something's stuck in her throat. She just hides her face in Uncle Bucky's neck instead.

She feels them look at each other over her head.

"Em," Uncle Steve says. Very gently, and not touching her at all. "Do you know where your dad went?"

He sounds so sad. But Emma shakes her head. Uncle Bucky is wearing one of his softest hoodies; it smells like sweat and Uncle Bucky. Underneath is the faintest, faintest smell of her daddy, from being mixed with his clothes in the wash, and she buries her nose in it, squishing the bendy cartilage until it hurts.

Uncle Bucky licks his lip. "He said," he says, then stops. "He said he had to go where you came from."

Emma goes very still.

"Emma." Uncle Steve's big warm hand on her shoulder. "We need to know."

She shakes her head hard into Uncle Bucky's neck.

"Emma--"

" _I don't know_!"

She streaks out of Uncle Bucky's hold, scrambling onto the floor and down the short, dark hallway. There is a dark room, and a big hulking wardrobe inside it, she remembers this place now, this dark, musty-smelling place where Daddy brought her after--after--

She crawls up onto the top of the wardrobe, tucked close against the ceiling.

Uncle Steve comes in. His voice is low and soothing, but Emma's shaking too hard to hear what he's saying. She curls her arms over her head, and Uncle Steve reaches for her, and she hisses.

He stops. She shakes, and smells Uncle Bucky, hears the almost inaudible sound of his voice as he says something to Uncle Steve. They both leave the room, and Emma curls up and shakes harder.

Her eyes are hot and red and yellow and Uncle Steve will never keep her, now.

 

Steve looks up when Bucky comes out onto the front porch. Bucky hesitates a moment on the top porch step next to him, an animal deciding whether or not to approach the watering hole while something that could eat it is there, and then he crouches awkwardly next to Steve, his ankles tucked behind him. His hoodie is gone, and in his plain white t-shirt with the long gleaming curve of his arm, he looks younger than Steve can ever remember thinking of him as, Bucky who was always bigger, always older, always leading Steve ahead.

It's cold out here. Their breaths curl white from their mouths. Steve pulls off the flannel shirt he traded with Dean and holds it out to Bucky.

Bucky's eyes follow it up the line of his arms. They stop around his collarbone, like he can't look Steve in the face.

"Bucky."

Bucky shakes his head.

"Smells like him," he says. "It makes her sad."

Steve's insides sink all over again. Thinking of how white Emma looked, how stricken. He knows how sensitive her nose is--to hear his anger cloaked in Dean's scent. How she must have felt. He knots his fingers between his knees and presses them against his head.

"Do you know where he went?" he says to the denim over his knees. "He sent you here, so he must--he must have been planning something."

Bucky doesn't say anything. Steve feels wretched with guilt. He has only just found Bucky, and Bucky has gone through so much, and here Steve is focused on Dean Dean Dean.

Not that Bucky seems to notice, or care. He just stares out at the silent Impala and the shadows beyond her with the blue eyes that seem so much paler than Steve remembers.

"He said he had a mission," he says finally. "He wanted to make sure there was someone to take care of her before he left."

Steve digs his fingers harder into his scalp.

"Will you keep her?"

Steve looks up. "What?"

"Will you keep her," Bucky repeats.

Steve remembers the way Dean watched him and Emma sometimes. The times he hung back instead of stepping forward to join them. Watching, like he was studying what was being built between them, assessing it for strengths, for weaknesses.

His fingers clench harder in his hair. Then he pushes to his feet. Bucky's not the only one Dean gave _just in case_ instructions to. "Buck, I need you to go inside."

Bucky doesn't move. Just crouches there, watching Steve with his phantom eyes.

"Bucky. Please."

Bucky keeps watching him. "What are you doing?"

Steve gives up. Strides to a patch of fairly clear ground in front of the Impala and drops down onto his knees. He folds his hands together, toes curling in his boots under him, and hesitates. Looks back over his shoulder at Bucky. The last time he knelt like this, it was next to him, Bucky elbowing him to look at Mrs. Pandowski's new ugly brooch. This Bucky just looks back at him, untouched by the memory enfolding Steve, and he takes a deep breath and turns back, facing the patch of velvety sky visible above the trees.

"O Castiel," he says, mouth uncertain around the name he has only ever heard shaped by Dean's mouth. "I need your help. Please."

Bucky goes stiff behind him. There are wingbeats, and then a man stands two feet away from them. He wears a trench coat and a suit underneath and his eyes are not human.

"Sergeant," he says.

His voice is very low. Steve looks at Bucky, who rises up out of his crouch. But doesn't move otherwise, staying on the top porch step.

The man's eyes slide to Steve. "Captain Rogers," he says. "We haven't met."

He extends a hand. Steve takes it, numbly.

"Yes," the man says to the question Steve hasn't voiced. "I am the angel Castiel. Where is Dean?"

"Shouldn't you know?"

The words escape his mouth in a petty snap. He immediately compresses his lips, irritated with himself, but the angel doesn't look offended; it merely returns its gaze from where its eyes have slid to Bucky back to Steve.

"Dean doesn't like it when I keep…tabs on him." There are invisible quotation marks around the word. It studies Steve a moment longer, and then its mouth, too, compresses.

"He's gone," Bucky says behind Steve. "Where did he go?"

The angel's eyes don't widen. But something about it becomes alarmed, abruptly, and resigned at the same time.

"I see," is all it says.

"We need to find him," Steve says.

The angel's expression is almost kind as it looks at him. It studies him for a long, long time. What seems like forever. Then it disappears.

Steve spins. Eyes raking the forest around them, the empty porch.

Then the angel is back in the same spot in front of the car. Only Emma is beside it now, wrapped in Bucky's hoodie, one hand in the angel's and the other rubbing blearily at her reddened eyes.

"Very well," the angel says. "Let us go to Dean."

 

\- - -

 

Garth is saying something behind him. Dean's not sure what it is. But he hears the sound of the door shutting, the ominous creak and click of the locks. Thinks he can remember telling Garth to leave once they got close to finishing, didn't want Garth around in case--

in case--

They're still not sure it'll work. The first two Trials seemed to accept him okay, the trip through Purgatory to Hell where he got hold of an innocent soul and Emma in the bargain, and carried them both up into the world, one to Heaven and one to a rotting body on the side of I-90, and the Hell Hound he gutted, its blood cold and drying tackily on his skin; they both made him light up the way Sam did, a gold-toned Aurora Borealis under his skin. But he knows he's not clean, will never really be clean, with those tortured souls in Hells still dark beneath his fingernails like grime he'll never scrub out. And he wasn't with Sam, at the (not)end with Crowley to see if this was how things went; if his veins started to go dark and torturous, to pump what felt like poison into his guts and brain, so that he feels dizzy and ataxic, like he's going to throw up, sweat slick on his hands, his face, beneath his shirt and jeans. These might be signs of rejection; he might be pumping his seventh needle of blood into the gagged, bound demon for nothing; the Gates of Hell might stay gaping as open as they've been since he and Sam let them be opened in Wyoming, all those years ago.

"Dean," he can distantly hear a voice saying. He blinks sweat from his eyes and veers drunkenly around: the demon is still sobbing in the chair; the skinny dark-haired college kid it's possessing is sobbing in the chair, begging for mother, begging for Mary, and Dean is trying to focus, Dean is blinking and swaying and holding onto the wall of the bunker's dungeon, and it's Tessa, it's Tessa looking gently at him.

"Dean," she says, and for the first time he wonders what Reaper came for his mom when it was time for her to go.

Sam got Death, he thinks. This is better. He's almost relieved to have Tessa.

"Almost," he rasps, because she's had this fight with him before.

_You're not the first soldier I've plucked from the field._

"I know," she says. She stands there as he turns back around and fumbles up the last needle with shaking, clumsy hands. He stops with it in his hands, head bowed, staring down at it. The hitched, cracking mumbles of the demon press in on the edges of his ears, like whispers, like the spectators that hung all around like smoke in Hell, like the ones in line for his rack, the ones in wait for him on the rack, and he sways, and falls to his knees, and digs his forehead into the edge of the table. His hand into the ground.

"Do you know?" he whispers. "Which direction I'm going?"

Tessa's presence floats closer. Like a white dress billowing in the air, even though she's in a sweater and jeans. "You know I can't tell you that."

Dean nods slowly, his eyebrow scraping against the rough-hewn wood. He grips it tighter, and then makes to push to his feet.

Then:

The flutter of wingbeats.

"Dean."

He turns slowly. Cas stands there, and with him, Steve and Barnes. And.

He retches. Blood fountaining from him, light shining in bright, shifting gold-white prisms from the needle holes in his skin. They shift across the wall, and the demon, and Emma's terrified face.

 _No_ , he thinks.

Cas's hand is on his sternum. Holding him up. Dean turns into his hold, into the red-spattered white of his shirt, trying to hide his face and the way his shoulders shake with the spasms of his diaphragm, the blood painting the cough receptors of his throat. He fumbles for Cas's wrists, trying to grasp them in his own, but his hands are too slick with blood, and too weak, not cooperating with him. Cas seems to understand anyway, and he lifts Dean, walks him like a toddling child back to the weeping boy in the chair and holds Dean's hands steady around the syringe.

"Don’t let her see," Dean mumbles. "Don't--don't let her--"

Cas murmurs something. Dean can't quite understand what it is, nor see anything, behind the light and sweat shifting in his eyes, and together he and Cas push the needle beneath the skin, as the demon screams and thrashes beneath them.

" _Lustra_ ," Dean mumbles. Licks his lips, the blood from them, trying to make room for the words. " _Lustra_ …" Cas's thumb against his pulse, pushing in, a reminder, and Dean pushes the last of it out, eyes wide like he can see the finish line in front of him instead of blinding white light, " _Lustra_!"

An explosion. Not of light but of sound, and pain. Dean screams with it, and writhes with it, and begs, begs begs begs Cas, Cas please--scrabbling, thrashing, and somewhere in all that pain he can hear shouting, and a high plaintive wail

 

then cool hands. Cool hands, and his own face coalescing to be held by them, as he pants and stares up at Tessa, blinking rapidly.

 _Dean_ , she says. They are looking at his body. His body that Cas still holds cradled in his lap, as blood-soaked and blood-flecked as that day in Harmony. Steve is crouched in horror beside it, holding a screaming Emma, and standing above them Barnes is white-faced. His fingers, flesh and metal, gripping handfuls of his hair.

 _You promised,_ Dean thinks. _Sarge. You promised._

Barnes rocks to his feet. He swings into the air, wildly, with his metal hand, and Tessa gasps as it travels through her. Stumbles back.

"Me," Barnes says, eyes wild, focused on her as if he can see her. "You. Take _me_."

Behind him, Steve chokes.

"No," Dean says in a panic. Grabbing Tessa. "No, don't, come on--"

Tessa freezes. For a split second, Dean's sure her eyes have turned yellow, and a terror rushes through him like a tidal wave, roaring.

Then the yellow coalesces into a reflection, not yellow but gold, and he turns to see a man behind them both, in a golden helmet to match the staff held in his hand.

"Is it satisfying?" the man says. "To see the hole you'll leave behind. There's a joy in it, isn't there?"

Dean stares at him. Dread seeps through him. Don't, he begins to try to say, but he's as frozen as Tessa and the man lowers the staff and

 

"Dean."

He turns slowly. Cas stands there, and with him, Steve and Barnes. And.

He retches. Blood fountaining from him, light shining in bright, shifting gold-white prisms from the needle holes in his skin. They shift across the wall, and the demon, and Emma's terrified face.

" _Dean_ ," Steve says.

Dean tightens his grip on the syringe. But there's already a cold hand around his wrist, thumb grinding into the bones until his fingers go nerveless. The syringe clatters to the ground. Steve dives to snatch it up.

"Stop," Dean yells. Frantic and ferocious. Everything swimming around him. "Give it _back_!"

"You'll die if you finish this!" Steve yells back. He looks furious in a way he never has before, his eyes blue and afire. "Do you--"

Dean snaps his head backward. Pain flares bright but ignorable as he feels Barnes' nose crunch behind him. He drives his elbow hard into Barnes' gut at the same time, whirling and ducking out of his grip even though it feels as though it nearly tears his hand from his arm. He scrabbles for the table, nearly falling over it, and grabs one of the extra needles sitting in his kit there. He slides it into his arm with slippery fingers, too slippery, too shaky; he feels the vein blow as much as he sees it, the dark blood welling up and out. He digs his fingers into the wood, trying to stay upright as dark dots swim across his vision.

After a few breaths he becomes aware of something on his leg. Emma's Amazonian fingers digging through his jeans like kittens' claws. She's clinging to him, trying to climb up his leg, her face hot and wet and red and yellow. "Daddy," she's hiccupping, "Daddy, don't go, don't go."

"Baby," he mumbles. "Baby, baby, this is better, I promise it's better this way--"

" _Christo_ ," she cries. " _Christo, Christo, Christo_ ," and beats at his chest, claws at his eyes. Steve grabs her under the arms to pull her off. She howls at him, kicks until his nose is bleeding, a shock of bright red blood against the older blood darkening all around them.

"You promised!" she screams. "You _promised_!"

Her eyes are red. Her eyes are red like in Purgatory when he held his hand out to her with his last finger extended and told her how about pinky swears and how they were never, ever broken.

 _"This is a pinky promise," he said. "I will_ never _leave you behind again."_

_She stared at him. At his extended finger, at the glowing, swirling mass of his left arm and the soul inside it. The wound waiting, dripping blood, on his other._

_"Never?" she echoed. The first thing she said to him in that place, and it made his insides go tight and hot._

_"Never."_

_Her baby finger, so thin and strong as it curled around his._

Dean blinks rapidly. Sweat or blood or something else from his eyes. He blinks, and the chair and its bindings are empty. Blood all around it but no one inside it.

The man with the staff is gone, too.

"No," he says. Barely audible. "No no no--"

Tessa unfreezing. Her eyes wide and scared. She looks at him, their eyes meeting. Then she fades like condensation from a windshield.

Cas's hand against his face. Emma's arms around his neck. Arms lifting him onto his feet, another slinging one of his over broad shoulders, a strong neck. Dean is shaking, quaking with rage and sobs that grab his ribcage and yank it to and fro. Sounds are escaping him, inhuman sounds, and Emma clings to him more tightly, almost choking. He wants to throw her off. He wants to crush her close.

A big hand against his back, between his shoulder blades. Too close. He hates the very beat of his heart against it.

Familiar disorientation. Familiar furniture: their house, the hallway credenza with its crooked handle.

Cas's voice, murmurs he can't make out, and Steve's. Cas and Steve and Dean hates them both, wants to rip the feathers from one and the skin from the other and he shakes under Emma, shakes around her.

A movement. Silence, voices moving away. Emma, protesting. The long stinging lines along his neck from her fingernails as her hands are unknotted and pulled away. A firm hand, unyielding plates of metal.

His teeth are clicking together. There is steam around him, wet warmth and hands stripping the bloody clothes from his skin.

Bucky says nothing when Dean's eyes finally focus on him. He finishes peeling Dean's undershirt from his chest where dried blood has stuck it to the tiny hairs there, and then he drops onto one knee. Dean numbly, obediently, resentfully steps out of his blood-sodden jeans one leg at a time. Then out of his boots, as Bucky unlaces them, and then he braces one hand on Bucky's rounded metal shoulder to step into the shower, his knees suddenly unsteady beneath him.

The water pounds down on his scalp. It streams into his eyes as he stares down his arms, sticky with brown-red blood.

He doesn't ask _why_. He doesn’t say _he took it_. Or _you took it_. There is blood in the valleys of his elbows and nothing else; whatever burned through his arteries and sat at the ends of his bones is gone, let out like air in his tires, and what is left behind is ruined, bent into useless shapes.

He will not be able to try again.

Bucky sits on the edge of the bathtub. He sits and he rubs the bar of soap inside a washcloth until there are suds and then he turns so that his legs are inside the shower, one knee on either side of Dean's. He takes Dean's hand and begins to scrub. Under his fingernails and between his fingers and the lines of his palm and his split knuckles and thick wrists. He scrubs until the water runs red and until the water runs pink and until the water runs clear. Then he turns Dean gently, a metal palm against the knob of his hip, and does the same thing with the other side.

Steve comes in while he is rubbing the terrycloth in circles over the inside of his elbow. There is a pair of folded sweat pants over his arm, and a folded shirt on top of that. He comes one step into the bathroom, then two, and Dean is numb and boneless but he is stiff and quivering, and something inside him flinches away.

Steve's lips fall shut. He drifts back out of the bathroom, and Dean pulls his hand out of Bucky's. He turns off the shower.

"You guys can have my room," he says, and steps out of the shower over him to get dressed.

Bucky says nothing. Nor does he follow Dean, and so Dean walks down the hallway, past Emma's door with Steve's low voice murmuring inside it, and down the stairs. There are already folded blankets laid at the end of the couch, and he unfolds one of them and lies down under it and pulls it over his head.

 

For a long time the darkness is good. Eventually it becomes too close and confining, and he yanks the blanket down like he's yanking out a gag, choking.

Bucky sits on the armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

"Said you could have my room," Dean rasps. "Do what you want to, I don't care."

Bucky doesn't say anything for a long time. Then he slides off the armchair and comes silently over to the couch. He sinks fluidly to the floor there, just outside the reach of Dean's hand, and leans back against the cushion.

Then he begins to speak.

His voice is still very low, as it has always been, as if he does not want anyone to hear it. And Dean can feel the reverberations of it through the couch more than anything, a halting story about a girl Bucky remembers Steve being sweet on. There isn't much to the story, not much more than him remembering that she had a fancy red ribbon she wore tied in her hair every day to show off because someone in her family had sent it to her from very far away, maybe London. One day another boy who liked her tugged on her hair and the ribbon got tugged loose and fell into a dirty puddle on the ground and she cried and Steve yelled at the boy for tugging on her hair in the first place.

"What then," Dean says.

Barnes licks his lips. Licks them again, eyes flickering away.

"I got punched," comes a voice from the doorway. Dean turns his head above the blanket, the fabric soft against his chin, and sees Steve is there, his shoulder against the jamb.

"That's the way most of these stories end," he says, and comes to the end of the couch. "May I?"

Dean looks at Barnes, who isn't looking back at him. He shrugs, pulling his legs up to make room on the third cushion. Steve doesn't sit on it but perches on the arm of the soda instead, pulling his socked feet up onto the couch so that they rest on the cushion instead. His toes slide under the blanket, just barely brushing Dean's. Dean stiffens.

"Did you punch him back?" Barnes says. His brow is creased.

"I tried," Steve says. His nose crinkles in a way that's rueful and amused at the same time. "Wasn't quite tall enough to reach his nose."

 "You got him in the throat," Barnes says. It's not quite a question. "We both got whipped for that one."

"Yep," Steve says, and under his blanket, Dean curls up more tightly.

No one says anything for a minute. Then Steve slides the rest of the way onto the cushion, until his hip is pressed against Dean's heels, and says, "Tell us another one, Buck?"

 

("There was a man," Dean says when Steve asks, much later that night. "In a--helmet." He gestures uselessly.

Steve sits forward, eyes suddenly very alert. Hooks both hands against his head. "Like this?"

Dean nods against the couch cushion. His knees are warm against Bucky's back through the blanket.

Steve pushes to his feet. He crosses to the window, staring out of it, then strides back. Drops onto his knees before them, his eyes searching Dean's face.

"Did he say what he wanted?"

"To stop me from closing up Hell?" Dean says bitterly.

Steve's face contorts. Empathy and sympathy and judgment all at once.

"You shouldn't have stopped me," Dean snaps. Not because he wants the fight but because it is all he can think, a merry-go-round he can't get off of, his insides sick and spinning and hitting the walls of himself. Splattering and dripping wetly down.

"I know what it feels like." Steve's voice very quiet. His eyes flicking to Bucky and then to Dean. "Wanting it all just to…end."

Barnes' back very tense against Dean's knee.

"There's things I would've missed if it did." Steve's voice even quieter than before. His eyes blue and dark on Dean's.

Dean doesn't say anything. He breathes, and clenches his jaw, and refuses to meet Steve's eyes, and eventually Steve pushes to his feet. He pulls a blanket over Bucky, and another over Dean, and then he curls up on the floor without one of his own.

After a while, Bucky moves fluidly onto his knees. Pulls the blanket off of himself and pulls it over Steve. Turns back, and meets Dean's eyes in the dark.

They do not sleep.)

 

Days pass. Then a week. Emma won't let Dean out of her sight but she won't talk to him, either. Just hangs onto his leg or his waist or his neck and won't let go. After that first night downstairs on the couch, he sleeps in her room with her, trapped in the octopus basket of her arms and legs, staring at the ceiling and trying to breathe. There is a weight on top of him always, heavy and unmoving, a corpse.

Barnes and Steve sleep in his room. Dean hears Barnes as he is lying awake some nights, hears the sudden muffled shout and the shuddering, tortured breaths and Steve's voice low, unintelligible, soothing. The slow gradual lapse back into quiet, and the next morning, both of them at the table as if nothing happened: Steve at the stove stirring oatmeal or pancakes for breakfast and Barnes at the table with a newspaper doing the crossword and sudoku and the jumble. Looking up when Dean comes down with Emma in his arms, and Barnes pushing the comics toward her to read, and Dean sitting there under both of their out-of-the-corner-of-their-eye watch with Emma's bony, resentful weight digging into his lap.

They are both tiptoeing around him now, but he knows they will leave eventually. They will both leave, this time, and without the trials there are nights and nights of nothingness stretching out ahead of him. Nights of him and Emma and math books and vegetables and board games and he knows that should be enough, doesn't understand why that isn't enough when he came so close to having nothing at all.

 

The black SUVs come back the second week. There is a tired-looking man in jeans and a windbreaker with them, and Steve points him out through the window to Emma and Bucky and says, "That's Sam," and goes outside.

He talks to them for a very long time. When he comes back inside, Bucky is looking at him while trying not to look at him.

They both look at Dean, and Dean takes the message and Emma and goes out back, to the little stoop where he'll be able to hear gunshots and get them to the Impala quickly if they need to.

There are no gunshots. Only, half an hour later, Steve coming out the back door with Sam Wilson and introducing him to Dean and saying that he and Bucky have to go into HQ but they will be back, all right?

All right, Dean says.

He thinks about telling Steve they don't have to come back. He's too tired to make the words. The contortions of his mouth. He sticks his hand in his pockets, instead, and watches Emma drag a stick through the slush, and only eventually becomes aware that Wilson is sitting next to him. The sounds of engines are long gone.

After a while, Dean says, "M'brother's name is Sam."

"I heard that," Wilson says. "You can call me Wilson if you want. Or son of Wil. I answer to that, too."

"They ask you to stick around and babysit?"

"If you wanna put it that way." Wilson watches him. "Think Steve's kinda worried about you. He said you're not in such a great place right now."

"Yeah, well." Dean's arms dangle over his knees. "I've been here before. I'll probably be here again." He looks over at Wilson. "I don't need a tour guide."

Wilson spreads his hands. "I'm not here to do any guiding, man. I'm not Gandalf, just… I dunno. A hobbit. I cover the eating and the comic relief."

Dean looks meaningfully at his feet. Wilson laughs.

 

In the end, though, Wilson doesn't stay very long at all. A week and a half in, he gets called back to SHIELD; there's some sort of alien thing going on that all the news stations are covering, and Dean turns them all off, stubbornly, lets Emma watch _The Land Before Time_ over and over and over until he gets used to waking up to the Diana Ross credits song at the end. It's like he said, this isn't anything he hasn't lived through before, the loneliness and the hatred and the self-hatred and the wanting to kill and the wanting to die and he swallows all sorts of things at night, from bile to sobs to whiskey, but he's tired, and he's done this too many times, looked at himself in the mirror too many times, for any of it to make much of a dent, at all.

So he goes through the motions. Takes Emma to school and picks her up from it and pawns more of the things from his dad's lock-up and goes grocery shopping with the money and picks up more shifts at the garage. The only time Emma talks to him is when she's sleeping, indignantly demanding not to be made to feed bread to the Canadian geese because they have _teeth_ , Daddy, and Dean says into the dark, "I won't, I won't" until she quiets down, stops mumbling and kicking restlessly and lies still again, her breaths whistling a little through her nose as she grips his finger.

He remembers now how angry Sam always was that Dad never promised them they were safe, that he never told Sam there wasn't a monster in his closet. He thinks about how much better his dad was than him, not giving his kids promises that he couldn't keep.

He remembers the man he half thinks he must have imagined, with his staff and his glittering eyes: _Isn't it satisfying? To see the hole you'll leave behind._

But Dean is the hole, and whatever he would have left behind would have better than what he is. Dean is the hole, and yet still he leaves his finger hooked inside Emma's each night, instead of pulling it free.

 

One afternoon when he picks her up from school. She gets into the car and she looks at him, and she says, "Dad."

He looks at her. She looks back at him with gravity, like she knows exactly how long it has been since she spoke to him on purpose. She waits for him to start to say something, and to clear his throat, and to try again. "Yeah?"

"I'm invited to Marie's birthday party."

"Oh yeah?" His voice sounds like something neglected. He clears his throat again. "That's great. When is it?"

"It's a slumber party."

Dean's mouth goes a little dry. Anything could happen overnight. Her fangs could come out on accident. Her eyes could go yellow. She could have a nightmare about Purgatory.

"Are you," he says. Licks his lips and looks at her head-on. "Do you want to?"

She bites first one fingernail, then another, for a few minutes. "I don't know," she whispers finally.

He pulls into their driveway. Pulls the Impala into park. And turns to look at her. "Why?"

"What if something happens?" she says. She's not looking at him, is picking at her tennis shoes with her one hand now, the other still at her mouth. "What if I have a bad dream?"

"Then you call me," he says. "And I'll come get you."

Emma doesn't say, _You promise?_ She just looks up at him. Her eyes are uncertain, and in that instant Dean sees how much he has lost and how much he will never get back.

"Okay," she says, and climbs out of the car.

 

That night, though. When they settle down on the couch in the living room after dinner. She sits against his side and falls asleep against his arm as Spike kicks his way out of his egg.

 

Two Fridays later he comes home from dropping her off at Marie's for the slumber party. There's a motorcycle in the driveway.

It's not Steve's motorcycle. Of course it's not, that's several states away where Dean ditched it after shaking the SHIELD tails. But it's the same kind, a Harley Davidson, and it has two helmets sitting on the seat where anyone could steal them, and Dean lets himself inside cautiously.

The house smells of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. Dean follows the smell to the kitchen, where Steve is poking something in a pot on the stove with a wooden spoon and Bucky is transferring garlic bread from a metal pan to a woven bread basket Dean vaguely recalls buying at a yard sale.

They look up when Dean's in the doorway. Steve looks bashful, and Barnes--has gotten a haircut. It's not much length off, mostly just some styling to make it less tangled and get rid of the split ends, and still choppy enough that Steve was probably the one who did the cutting, but. It looks good, and Bucky seems weirdly shy about it, ducking his head so that it hides his eyes.

Dean inhales. Then he grins, and steps into the kitchen, and tells Bucky, "Nice 'do, Manero."

Bucky frowns, apparently unfamiliar with the reference, but Steve laughs.

"M-a-n-e-r-o," he tells Barnes, who takes a small, shiny-looking cell phone out of his pocket and types it in. A moment later, a huff escapes him and he lifts his middle finger at Dean. Dean just grins harder and kicks out a chair to sit in, folding his arms.

"So what're you two mooks doing back here?" he says. "They kick you out of SHIELD?"

Steve and Bucky look at each other. Steve's expression is perplexed and thoughtful at once, his brow creased, while Bucky has no expression at all, yet Steve seems decisive when he breaks eye contact with him to look back at Dean, as though he understood something from Bucky's impassive face.

"We always intended to come back, Dean," he says. Slowly, like Dean might have trouble understanding. "It was just a question of how long we were…"

"Interrogated," Bucky says as Steve says, "Held up."

"Oh," Dean says, as if that makes it all clear. "Gotcha. So…when does Fury want you back?"

"Now?" Bucky says, again with the dry tone. He tilts his head back to look at Steve.

"They want us," Steve clarifies. "But we." He looks at Bucky, looking uneasy for the first time. "Requested an indefinite leave of absence."

"But you--" Dean looks between them. "There's a lot you could do."

"Yes." Steve's eyes are blue and soft."There's a lot we could do." He takes a step toward Dean. "There's also a lot we _can_ do."

Dean's eyes flick back and forth between them.

"Cap thinks we deserve a break," Bucky says. There's an edge to his voice that says he doesn't necessarily agree, but he's going with it. "That there's things we could do that are just as important as--" He crooks his metal fingers into quotation marks, "'frantic missions of self-flagellation.'"

"I dunno," Dean says. He glances at Steve, feeling strangely hunted despite, or perhaps because of, the aura of benevolence emanating from him. Like he's angling to trap Dean in a hug. He wonders if Steve has had that talk with Bucky yet, if Bucky knows that Dean filled in for him in bed while Steve thought he was dead. "Self-flagellation's always been pretty effective for me."

Steve makes a displeased sound. Then, with another last glance at Barnes, he takes another step forward, closing the distance between himself and Dean and catching his jaw to tilt his head up for a kiss.

Dean melts into it. He hadn't realized how much he wanted it until it happened and every inch of him is straining forward trying not to let it go.

He tears away.

"Sorry." Eyes flying to Barnes. "Sorry--"

"Don't be."

Dean stares at him. Barnes stares back from beneath his hair, his lip drawn under his teeth. He lets it go. It's red and bitten.

"Steve said maybe we could--" His voice is gruff and uncertain at once, his eyes blue and young as they meet Dean's, "both."

Dean is completely confused for a minute. He stares at Bucky trying to figure out what he means. Bucky moves soundlessly toward him until he's toe to toe with Dean, their faces nearly touching. Until Dean can smell the scent of Barnes' hair, sweet and clean like Emma's no-tears shampoo.

Barnes swallows. Dean does, too. Then Barnes touches the inside of his elbow. Two fingertips to the pulse. Leans in and touches their mouths together.

Dean barely breathes. The lightest exhalation out, and Bucky pulls back. They stare at each other.

Then Bucky's hand comes up carefully. He cups the back of Dean's neck, infinitely gentle with his metal arm, and leans in again. This time Dean opens his mouth, lets him in, and the slow soft path of tongue along the inside of his lip is even gentler than his hand.

When Bucky leans back this time, Dean's lips are as red and wet as his. He presses them together, and parts them again, staring still at Bucky, dazedly, and then he looks at Steve. He's sitting at one of the table chairs. There's something wistful and grateful on his face at the same time, and Dean's knees sort of buckle. He finds the back of a chair, with his hand, and drops into it.

"Lemme make sure I'm reading this right," he says, and his voice is taut, wobbling in a way that's not really laughter. "Two grandpas from the forties are trying to invite me to a threesome."

Neither of them crack a smile. Steve's expression just becomes something more concerned, and maybe even alarmed, and that's when Dean realizes his shoulders are shaking. And that there's a sound coming from him that sounds an awful like a choked-off sob.

He crams his knuckles into his mouth. Vision blurring and elbow digging hard into his knee and there are soft voices on either side of him, a cool unyielding hand cupping his ankle and a warmer bigger one against his back, and Bucky is murmuring something into his knee.

У меня есть ты. У меня есть ты.

Я держу тебя , Дин. 

 

\- - -

 

Months and months later. It's nine at night and Steve's putting Emma to bed in her room and Dean and Bucky are lying in bed in their own, kicking each other idly with their socked feet. Dean's reading aloud the Jon Stewart book Wilson lent to Steve, and Bucky's snorting at the acerbic captions, hands knitted behind his head on the pillow.

A gale of laughter bursts from down the hall. It means Steve's finished telling Emma her bedtime story and is getting tickled to wrestle her into bed. Dean pauses reading to listen, and Bucky is quiet, too, rolling onto his side to tuck his foot under Dean's.

The laughter ends. There's the click of a nightlight, and then a bedroom door, and then Steve's footsteps coming quietly down the hallway.

He stops in the doorway. Just stands there for a moment, looking at them. Bucky's in basketball shorts and a long-sleeve Henley; Dean's in sweat pants and the reading glasses he finally conceded he might kind of need. Steve takes them in, and then he shuts the door quietly behind him and takes a running leap onto the bed.

They both shout in complaint as he lands heavily on top of them. Bucky gets an elbow to his gut and Dean kicks in protest and Steve is laughing uncontrollably, and Dean sits up to wrestle the pillows out from under himself and throw them on Steve's face. Steve laughs harder as Bucky joins in, burying him in pillows and then sitting on top of him in the bargain.

Bucky motions to Dean to start reading again. Dean lounges back onto the pillows, which are shaking with Steve's totally undignified giggles, and opens the book again.

He's only just taken a breath to begin when someone starts knocking on the bedroom door.

"Oops," Steve says, completely unrepentant.

Dean rolls off the bed. He opens the door and Emma stands there in her Frozen nightgown, her hands on her hips.

"Hey," she says severely. "Keep it down in here!"

Steve bursts into laughter all over again. Emma breaks into a grin, clearly quite pleased with herself, and Dean scoops her up, tossing her over his shoulder and heading back to the bed. She lands with an "oomph!" on top of Steve and crawls her way over him to flop on top of Bucky. Dean slides in on his other side, tugging one of the pillows out from under Steve for them and yanking the blankets up.

Emma yawns and sets her chin on Bucky's metal shoulder. "Story."

"Steve just told you one."

"I want another one."

"Spoiled," he retorts.

She sticks her tongue out at him. Bucky pretends to snap at it with his teeth. She howls and kicks happily, nailing Steve in a place that makes him groan and scoot out of the way.

"Oops," she says repentantly.

Now Bucky's grinning at her. "All right, I guess I can give you a story after that."

Steve makes a noise of protest. Bucky thumps him in the shoulder. "Once upon a time there was a princess. She hadn't washed it in a really long time, but she found a hair dresser who was really good at untangling knots."

"That's me!" Emma says.

"Yup."

"How come you get to be the princess?"

"'Cause it's my story."

She pouts. "I don't like your story."

"Too bad so sad," Bucky says, and above their heads, Dean and Steve catch each others' eyes, shaking with laughter.

Steve reaches over Bucky's hip, his hand finding Dean's. Dean lets him weave their fingers together, rolling over to press his face into Bucky's shoulder blade. To hide whatever it is that's expanding uncontrollably inside of him, the happiness that is too much or the fear that it can't last.

Bucky leans back into him like he can feel the thoughts. Steve squeezes his fingers. And Emma says, " _Dad_ , Bucky's being a jerk!"

Steve splutters with laughter. Bucky rolls his eyes. And Dean shifts over to make room for Emma as she climbs over Bucky to curl up under the comforter with him instead. He presses a kiss to the top of her head and relaxes back into his pillow.

When they've all settled down again and it's quiet except for the sound of the occasional car passing by outside, Bucky says into the stillness:

"Punks."

Steve and Emma's laughter echoes through the room. 

Dean holds her closer and closes his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

_Though I am late, I will wait to go_

_Until I know you're somewhere safe._

_\--_ "Once," B.C.K.

 

 


End file.
